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Did an interview with Phil a little while ago. He's a quality guy, check this excerpt and the rest can be found at the link at the bottom.




It’s a predictable pattern for artists to come out with a ground breaking debut album, and then spend the rest of their careers trying unsuccessfully to match the power of their first work. Machine Head first made a splash in the metal world with 1994’s sublime Burn My Eyes. While their next few albums were solid, their relevance seemed to be in danger after the commercial and critical failure of their fourth album in 2001. The band was then dropped from their label and seemed on the verge of falling into obscurity.

But instead of packing up and going home, Machine Head returned in 2004 with Through the Ashes of Empires, their heaviest and most complex album to that date. The overall quality of the album and the band’s consistently amazing live show quickly returned them to prominence. They’ve since rode the success of that album on to the release of this year’s The Blackening, another stunning effort that has been greeted with ever greater sales and critical acclaim. I spent a recent afternoon chatting with guitarist Phil Demmel about the band’s turnaround and what it means to be metal in 2007.

“Redemption is the big word in the Machine Head camp these days. I sometimes have a hard time reading the reviews and taking them seriously, but of course it validates what you do. You put a lot of hard work into something and anyone who works hard at something wants to be received well. It’s human nature to want to be accepted and we appreciate it.”

Acceptance aside, metal has always been a style of music that revels in rebellion and thrives on the notion of not being accepted by mainstream music. When I asked Phil how he felt about playing metal in such a commercialized era, he said he thinks that “Metal is kind of like the bastard child, the orphaned kid. You know, we all fight through a lot and we don’t sell millions of records like other styles of music do, so we’re out here on the street.

“For the most part, we stick together. If we don’t sort of bond together and look out for each other, no one will. Metal is such a dysfunctional family, but when someone’s in trouble everyone rallies around. You know, when I started playing metal when I got out of high school, people told me metal would never sell. Everyone had their ideas about ‘making it’. But then I ended up being the guy that gets signed and starts touring nationally and all the guys who told me that are coming to our shows now.”

In spite of commercial adversity, metal has been around for decades, albeit with fluctuating popularity. I asked Phil what he feels can account for metal’s inconsistency in North America compared to its relative stability in Europe.

“The media abroad is just more knowledgeable and just more in tune with what’s going on in music. They’re more likely to give something a chance that sounds a little different. The American media is still so cliquey and still so concerned with what Hot Topic or MTV thinks is cool. They seem to think that you’re a fucking geek if you don’t like this or you do like that. Europe isn’t like that as much. Most of the media over there has really been behind the band and behind what we’re about.”

I suggested to Phil that one of the reasons that Machine Head and metal in general have survived is that they continue to evolve. “Yeah there have been some changes over the years. This band chose to be on some high profile tours and do some different things, but that’s how we’ve always been. If you listen to each album, they’re all different; no two sound alike. We’re always trying to push ourselves and evolve as musicians.”

As for the band’s immediate plans, they plan to “tour the shit out of this record.” Along with that they plan to keep waving the flag of metal and representing the resolve and quality music that it stands for.