blacker than soot
Coal Chamber
by Jeffrey Perlah
Guitarist Miguel "Meegs" Rascon of Coal Chamber sits on the patio outside of Larabee North, a Los Angeles studio where the L.A.-based neo-metal band has just finished mixing its new album, Chamber Music. It's a peaceful setting-filled with chirping birds, pretty red flowers, and plenty of sunshine-a stark contrast to the record's smoldering riffs. Suddenly, from inside the studio, singer Dez Fafara taunts the mild-mannered Rascon like a schoolyard bully. "[Skid Row bassist] Rachel Bolan is on the phone," Fafara jokes. "He wants his chain back!" The item in question extends from Rascon's nose to his left ear. "The funny thing is, they think they're making fun of me," Rascon laughs. "I really did get the idea for it from watching Bolan."
Such taunting makes the scene far more Coal Chamberesque. For example, Chamber Music's monstrously heavy "Tyler's Song" is about Fafara's son Tyler, who got picked on a lot at school. "Dez is telling his son that he loves him and that he's gonna go through troubles just like any kid," Rascon says. "And that he'll be a man in the end. It's a positive song." Though its message is upbeat, "Tyler's Song" sounds menacing, as Rascon's down-tuned custom B.C. Rich rumbles through the dense rhythmic framework constructed by bassist Rayna Foss and drummer Mike "Mikey" Cox. "Often, my guitar sounds like a distorted bass," Rascon admits. After hearing "Tyler's Song" and other new cuts like "El Cu Cuy" (a Mexican term for the boogie man) and "Untrue," the Coal Chamber faithful will remember why they first labeled the band's music "spooky core." "Spooky core kind of became a movement with the kids," Rascon says. "They would come to our shows dressed up crazy and wearing makeup, which they can't do at home or at school."
Coal Chamber formed in 1994 after Fafara placed a classified newspaper ad for musicians. Rascon answered, and soon after, Cox and Foss joined the fold as well. Toward the end of 1994, Rascon gave a Coal Chamber demo tape to Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares, who helped the young quartet ink a deal with Fear Factory's label, Roadrunner Records. But soon after, Fafara quit Coal Chamber because his wife didn't want him in the band. The split was only temporary, however, and by the spring of 1995, Farfara had returned to the band.
While Chamber Music-which was produced by Josh Abraham (Orgy)-often sounds spooky and downright grotesque, it's also more landscaped and, as Fafara puts it, more "three dimensional" than the quartet's 1997 self-titled debut record. "Rather than going through the whole album like a bulldozer, and just killing you with simplistic riffs all the time, there's more peaks and valleys," Rascon says. "There's a lot more overdubbing on this record."
There's also more orchestration, as exemplified by "My Mercy," which includes a complete string section as well as keyboards by Cher's son Elijah Blue (of the band Deadsy). But the album's greatest show of studio ingenuity comes during a tight, polished cover of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey," which features vocals by the granddaddy of doom, Ozzy Osbourne. "All of our equipment was put away and it was just Ozzy in the booth," Rascon recalls about working with Ozzy. "We were saying, 'Try this Ozzy' and he would be like, 'You guys are the boss.' It's weird because he was so down to earth and so normal to us. But at first, it was like, 'Oh, it's Ozzy!'"
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