Revocation are back and better than ever. Their latest, Netherheaven, out today via Metal Blade Records, is a different sort of beast this time around. This is death-thrash of the highest (or most hellacious?) order. Netherheaven is a record that is as dark, and heavy, and certainly death metal-focused as you’ve ever been, but (but!) also these are Dave Davidson’s wildest solos, his most thoughtful and creative lyrics, and the melodies and harmonies are so on point. Netherheaven feels like an encapsulation of everything Revocation done well up to now, but also taken to the next level.
For Revocation, that means going from The Outer Reaches (aka space) and down into the various circles of Hell below – though as the old saying goes, as above, so below. If their last record was all dark colors and shades of green and blue, Netherheaven is as bright and fiery as Davidson’s new signature yellow axe. We’ve (mostly) traded the Lovecraftian horror for a more Gothic horror – the terror of religious and political tyranny, and Davidson recounts how some of that started as early as Catholic school, when he was cast in the Easter Passion Play as the Crucified One, Jesus Christ – and he was happy about it at the time, as any kid in the warm and gross clutches of the Catholic Indoctrination Academies would be. Interestingly, the difference between Lovecraftian and Catholic horrors are few – both talk of omnipotent Great Old God/Ones, both believe in that which they have and have not seen, and the terror of fanatical belief leads to horrors unimaginable (waves at modern human history).
I have always viewed Revocation as having a nice mixture of heady intellectualism and a punk’s heart. The progressive and technical is married to music meant to invoke a feeling more than inspire musical theory dissection. Was it intentional to kind of get away from these sci-fi ideas or philosophical existentialism into what is Netherheaven?
“I think as I’ve gotten more comfortable as a lyricist,” Davidson answers, “I think maybe naturally there is just more of a personal element to it, you can kind of pour more [of yourself] into it. I love writing music so much, and obviously when you’re writing songs you have to pair that music with lyrics. And that part of it takes much more out of me I think than the actual music writing part. Music can be more ethereal, and it can kind of mean anything. There’s a quote that says like there’s two things that don’t have to mean anything: one is music, and the other is laughter. So music, you hear a riff, and it could be the heaviest thing ever, but it might bring someone just complete joy, or it might elicit aggression in someone, or whatever. So music can kind of be much more, have a lot more meaning to different people.”
“And so I try to have my lyrics come from the heart,” he continues, “and be personal, but at the same time have a little bit of that element of symbolism to them where I’m not going to beat someone over their head. Because yeah, for ‘Nihilistic Violence’ the song that you’re referencing, I really wanted to make sure I didn’t make reference to a specific person or even day. I wanted to kind keep it vague enough. [Keeping it symbolic], I think in a way carries more weight actually. So that’s always my goal is to kind of hopefully provide some thought-provoking lyrics, provide something that’s as artful as the music itself. Because I never want it to be an afterthought. We spent so much time writing these songs; I want the lyrics to kind to fit the emotion of the music.”
Reader, you’ll have to forgive me, but also growing up Catholic, I had to ask him a little bit more about the general theme of the record and how it reflects Davidson’s transition from a good Catholic boy to a more considerate metalhead and Satanist (the movement, not Lucifer himself):
“I feel like metal is this wonderful kind of alchemy where you take these sort of brutal images or you’re singing about the horrors of the world, but in some way it can kind of have this cathartic release for people. When I read brutal lyrics from any band, I don’t think it’s an endorsement of that; if anything it’s sort of confronting the horror to be like look how terrible it is, but making music out of it and hopefully having some kind of release. We all have to confront our own mortality at some point in all these different things. Even with just what’s happening in other parts of the world, it’s a bone chilling to think about some of the horrors and atrocities that take place every single day. I think having empathy for your fellow man, all these things [is necessary].”
“It’s funny,” he continues, “being raised Catholic as well, though my mom wasn’t particularly religious. I think she just kind of wanted me to go to a good school or whatever, and Catholic schools were private. But I was a believer when I was a kid, obviously because you’re sort of surrounded by it, and we went to church because it was the community thing to do. But yeah, reading sort of the Tenants of the Satanic Temple, those feel much more kind of real and humanitarian than the Ten Commandments let’s say, just in terms of a modern day how to sort of live your life. I think if you had just kind of erased all religion and just did a mind wipe on humanity and presented them with two stone tablets, and one was the Ten Commandments and one was the Tenants of the Church of Satan but you didn’t tell which one was which, I think probably maybe more people might choose the Seven Tenants than the Ten Commandments. Certainly, it feels more humanitarian.”
“And a lot of the stories in the Bible or really any religious text are just incredibly brutal, and aren’t humanitarian or empathetic in any regard. So yeah, the whole idea with ‘Diabolical Majesty’ was sort of taking the idea of the whole good versus evil thing and just sort of flipping that around and being like no, really Satan’s the good guy in this equation. I wanted to flip it around and be like look at the persecution of heretics and non-believers at the hand of the Church Inquisition! I mean you can go down the line through history. Even in modern day there’s still people being oppressed due to the various religions all over the world and oppressed in rather horrific, brutal ways. So that was kind of my way of sort of playing with that symbolism, kind of flipping it around.”
“And then again,” Dave adds, “in regards to ‘Nihilistic Violence’ and nihilism seeming sort of like a release or whatever, that was actually pulled directly from a book by Chris Hedges called America the Farewell Tour, fantastic book. Chris Hedges, I put him in the same kind of caliber as like a Cornell West, a very brilliant thinker, forward thinking, very much a proponent of true democracy and free ideas. He talks about sort of the, throughout that entire book the theme is the crumbling of American society and how institutions, towns, cities, whole states are kind of hollowed out by just corporate greed, unfettered capitalism that just has no moral compass whatsoever. And he talks about when people sort of lose all hope, when they lose their job or they have to work three jobs but can’t even get health insurance, all these things. And then you add in the opioid crisis, you add in all sorts of brutalities that our society kind of inflicts on lower income poor neighborhoods, all these kinds of things you just kind of can’t escape from this cycle. And what happens, you lose hope and then you turn to violence. And that violence could be inflicted on others, or it could be self-inflicted. And he refers to that literally as nihilistic violence in the book, and I thought that was such a great title. I think that perfectly encapsulates kind of what I saw on January 6th and even leading up to it was just this outpour of rage misplaced, or I guess depends on how you look at it, but certainly the merger of corporatist and politicians and religion has created this sort of cauldron of just fucking pure chaos in this country. And people are rightfully upset, but I think unfortunately they’re kind of aligning themselves with forces that are only going to make things worse for them at the end of the day, so it’s just going to perpetuate a cycle of negativity as I see it.”
Switching gears to a musical violence, there is this triumphant nature to the way that Davidson writes and Revocation performs, and that’s on full display throughout the best record of their career. But when crafting the record aside from being like ‘fuck it, we’re going full death,’ what were they trying to do?
“It’s hard to say because I think going into this one, ever since Great is our Sin, we’ve had kind of more conceptual records, and it’s hard to say whether that influences my actual writing or not. I guess it’s kind of like a chicken or the egg type of scenario. I remember leading up to The Outer Ones I knew I wanted to do a Lovecraft-y ode to cosmic horror kind of record. Because I was reading a lot of the Lovecraft and I had a lot of different imagery in my mind. I want to say maybe it influenced the writing, but at the same time it’s not like I’m sitting down to write a riff, and I’m thinking like oh, Lovecraft or something, you know what I mean? It just kind of comes out in the same regard, whereas with this one I knew I didn’t want to do another cosmic horror record. I mean certainly you could probably do a whole career of cosmic horror and some bands do and it’s sick.”
“Even in just the colors of the album,” he continues, “we had these kind of greens and black and blue, kind of very spacey, kind of cosmic colors in the last one. I wanted to go more kind of reds and oranges and kind of more fiery, kind of hellish colors. I was like we went to outer space on the last one, let’s go to Hell on the new record. This is kind of a general thought and then obviously we can make it much more artful and interesting from there, but that sort of general, that seed was kind of planted in my mind. So I don’t know exactly how that concept maybe influenced my writing, if it was just kind of in the back of my subconscious. I mean I feel like my best stuff comes from my subconscious anyway. It’s like if I just have kind of even a murky idea of what I want, I just kind of let that marinate in my subconscious for a while, and it just kind comes out however it comes out. But I will say I always want to do something different with every record, you know what I mean?”
That something different descended down a cavern of skeletal steps into Revocation’s best record yet, and a shoe-in for Record of the Year. Lead-off single “Diabolical Majesty” is the perfect encapsulation for what Davidson and company have accomplished here – glorious, fiery riffcraft.
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