Brain Drill Piss on Metalcore, Up Ante on Death Metal

Clearly, the frenetic blastbeats, buzzsaw guitars and harrowing growls of Brain Drill’s debut, Apocalyptic Feasting, were heavily influenced by Cannibal Corpse. And that’s not a diss — not even to Cannibal bassist Alex Webster, who has called them “one of the most musically over-the-top bands I have ever heard” and said their music is “truly raising the bar for technicality, velocity and overall extremity in death metal.” But Brain Drill, who formed in 2005 in Santa Cruz, California, aren’t just interested in building upon the bludgeoning grind of the Corpse. They’re also inspired by Spawn of Possession, Origin, Disgorge, Decrepit Birth and Necrophagia.

“We were definitely inspired by all of those bands, and I always wanted to play technical death metal — but I wanted to take those influences and make sort of a musical collage, with elements from them all,” guitarist Dylan Ruskin tells MTVnews.com’s Metal File.

More important to Ruskin than creating a death metal gumbo was staying away from anything too formulaic. “We did not want this record to fit with any of the current trends,” he explains. “There’s deathcore, and there’s a metalcore scene out there, and it’s a complete trend. I don’t want anything to do with that. We just wanted to write the most crushing and technical death metal we could come up with, and make little metalcore kids sh– their pants.”

In addition to demonstrating their musical diversity and originality, Ruskin wants Brain Drill to be a hammer to the jaw of anyone who thinks death metal is simple or primitive. “With this record, we wanted to show everybody that there’s an underground genre of death metal that needs to be heard more,” he says. “It requires 20 million times more talent [than most subgenres of metal]. It’s harder playing arpeggios and gnarly riffs than it is to just play two open notes on the E string. Our biggest intention with this record was to crush people with our music and expand their minds beyond the limits of metalcore.”
Ruskin is the first to admit that what his band does isn’t for the weak-willed, but thinks fans of grindcore will quickly latch on to them.

On March16 in Buffalo, New York, Brain Drill will join the Black Dahlia Murder and Animosity on the road and they plan to stay on tour for months to come. After all, the stage is where Brain Drill really rip. “We end up playing the songs twice as fast,” he says. “Sometimes, we get so anxious to play heavier and faster live that we accidentally end up playing it all much faster than it is on the album.”

He’s not kidding. Watch the band’s full six-song set from Portland performed in a mere 18 minutes:
BRAINDRILL LIVE NOVEMBER 25th 2006

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