Nailbomb

Side-projects are rarely worth the tape they are recorded on. More often than not they are the vanity projects of disgruntled band members trying to prove they are undervalued in their day job. Nailbomb's Point Blank (originally released by Roadrunner in 1994 and recently reissued in a remastered edition) was not one of these. This was a collaboration of two band leaders indulging their love of music styles which couldn't be expressed through their fulltime occupations.

In 1993 Nottingham three piece Fudge Tunnel had supported Sepultura on their European tour. The English band had achieved moderate success, releasing the Big Black-influenced Hate Songs in E-Minor and Creep Diets on their home town's extreme label, Earache. Guitarist/vocalist Alex Newport met and married the daughter of Sepultura frontman Max Cavalera's wife, and relocated to Phoenix, Arizona. Sepultura had moved there when they signed to Roadrunner Records in the States. Having released 1991's Arise and 1993's Chaos AD on the label Sepultura's fortunes were ascendant, yet Cavalera was a man filled with vitriol.

Newport knew no one in the States, and so he hung out with Cavalera, and the two soon discovered they many musical interests in common. And so was birthed the Nailbomb project, with the manifesto "to make the fucking heaviest album ever." While they may not have achieved this goal, Cavalera nd Newport certainly created one of the angriest, most aggressive albums of the nineties. Point Blank was a misanthropist's gospel, a collection of tunes so drenched in blind hate that it threatened to overshadow both of their real bands.

While both Fudge Tunnel and Sepultura flirted with hardcore punk, neither had fully embraced it, preferring metal bombast over hardcore's barely controlled antagonism. Nailbomb drew on the metal-hardcore crossover rendered by the likes of Helmet, Discharge, Cro-mags and DRI, along with ideas drawn from the industrial metal of Godflesh, Ministry and Front Line Assembly.

The studio project, recorded at Cavalera's house and at Chaton Studio's in Arizona over a month in 1994, distilled all these brutal influences into an even more uncompromising proposition. From the cover photo - an image of a female Viet Cong suspect being interrogated with a US M16 to her temple entitled 'Point Blank Persuasion', there were no concessions made to commercial mass appeal. This was further borne out in the track titles - 'World of Shit', 'Religious Cancer', '24 Hour Bullshit' and 'Shit Pinata'.

Cavalera had long engendered an embittered, hostile attitude which had made him one of the most imposing and intense on stage presences in metal circles. Newport, on the other hand, had once ben described as being "as threatening as a plastic duck", and so it was some surprise that the Nailbomb partnership was a fifty-fifty equation. In an interview at the time he stated that "I care about people. While I haven't had a particularly hard life, there's still plenty wrong with the world to make a person angry".

Cavalera is credited with 'insults, guitars, bass, goner, samples', while Newport 'mouthful of hate, guitars, bass, negativity, samples'. He also produced the album, having blundered his way around the studio to produce Creep Diets. While there are certainly shadows of both Fudge Tunnel and Sepultura present, the collaboration is most compelling when both are in no-mans land. As guitarists they are entirely different in both style and sound, Cavalera's tight metal riffing the perfect foil to Newport's colossally bludgeoning and economic style, which is very reminiscent of Helmet.

The emphasis is totally on intensity here, with no fat whatsoever. Cavalera was the man, after all, who only had four strings on his guitar so he wasn't tempted to fiddle about with lead parts. The few fiddly guitar bits on Point Blank are handled by Cavalera's Sepultura cohort Andreas Kisser, and there are also guitar contributions from Fear Factory's Dino Cazeres, and Cavalera's stepson Ritchie Cavalera. Sepultura drummer (Cavalera's brother) Igor plays on six tracks, the rest implementing samples and drum machines in the rhythm department.

"My idea was to have more of a hardcore project with samples," says Cavalera in the album notes. "The industrial thing was more of Alex's idea...I wanted to be careful of how much we went with that." Predictably, the drum machine and sample tracks are the best here, both musicians responding to the unrelenting rhythmic assault with the enthusiasm of the newly converted. Samples include spoken word, washing machine and automobile abuse (?!), and weird ambience. These are used judiciously, woven into the tracks such as on 'World of Shit' where the repeated statement "hate is reality" becomes part of the rhythm, a counterpoint to Newport's riff. This, along with 'Va Toma No Cu' and 'While You Sleep, I Destroy Your World' are some of the standouts on Point Blank, unquestionably standing up to full-time industrial metal acts like Ministry and Godflesh.

Nailbomb was conceived as a one off project that would play a handful of shows, but not tour. In June 1995 they played at Holland's massive metal festival, Dynamo. This performance, with a band including Igor Cavalera, Front Line Assmbly's Rhys Fulber and Neurosis' Dave Edwardson, was recorded and released as Nailbomb's swansong. Entitled Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide it included most tracks from Point Blank, along with a cover of the Dead Kennedy's 'Police Truck' which featured the DK's D.H. Peligro on drums. This along with five other bonus tracks are included on the reissue.

Since Nailbomb, Cavalera left Sepultura to form Soulfly (whose forth album Prophecy is just out). Newport disbanded Fudge Tunnel not long after this project, and has continued working as a producer, including recording demos for System of a Down, At The Drive In, and The Melvins. He is currently playing in a three piece called Theory of Ruin who sound a lot like Big Black...