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Crypt Sermon Interview with Steve Jansson: Where Doom Grows

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Philadelphia’s Crypt Sermon made one of last year’s most impressive debuts with Out of the Garden (review here), a full-length of driving and metallic substance that recalled a heyday before doom and metal could really be thought of as separate entities. To call it a “powerhouse” effort would not be overstating it, since the five-piece’s command ran so strongly through the material as to betray the album’s being a debut at all. The response it earned after its release on Dark Descent Records was suitably fervent for a group brazenly lending a sense of freshness to a traditional style that so often prides itself on being stale.

Comprised of vocalist Brooks Wilson, guitarists Steve Jansson and James Lipczynski, bassist Will Mellor and drummer Enrique Sagarnaga, the story of Crypt Sermon is really just at its beginning point. Prior to Out of the Garden, the band issued 2013’s Demo MMXIII (review here) to serve notice of their arrival and intent, but while their denim-and-leather, fist-pump-ready doom seems to have arrived fully matured, Out of the Garden tracks like “Into the Holy of Holies” and the classically chugging “Heavy Riders” signaled as well that Crypt Sermon have begun a creative progression that, one hopes, will continue to play out as they move forward.

They’re keeping busy in the interim, of course. Local shows in Philadelphia with luminaries of various repute — they recently opened for the Philly date of the Decibel tour with Abbath and High on Fire, among others — plus strategic slots at major fests as they spread the word about who they are and what they do. Maryland Deathfest is booked for later this month, and they’ll be at Psycho Las Vegas in August. This spring, they also participated in Metal Blade Records‘ Metal Massacre 14, hand-picked to do so by curator Alan Averill, frontman of Primordial.

The upshot is Crypt Sermon, in addition to having songwriting and performance on their side, are putting in work-smarter-type work to spread their darkened, sometimes extreme gospel. I had the chance recently to chat with Jansson about the band’s latest doings, and you’ll find that complete Q&A after the jump.

Please enjoy:

crypt sermon 2So the Metal Massacre 14 compilation you guys are on was curated by Alan Averill from Primordial.

Yeah. From what I understand, he reached out to Matt at Dark Descent, and asked him if he could put us on the comp. But apparently when Enrique was working on the Season of Mist booth at Maryland Deathfest, Alan actually approached Enrique and told him how much he liked the band and the album. So I guess we were kind of on his radar from there for a little bit.

The response to the record in general seemed to be really widespread and positive. How did you feel about how the record got out there to people?

I admittedly was a little stunned. I thought we made a cool record for a style that not a lot of people were doing and that was just the ambition of it. I thought we did a pretty good job. I didn’t think anybody was going to give a shit about it. I just assumed that there were a few people who like the style might like it. Obviously we made it for ourselves. There wasn’t a lot of it going on. But it sort of took off and I was a little surprised by it. Somebody had said to me that I guess it scratched an itch that a lot of people that didn’t realize it needed to be scratched, but I don’t know. I’m definitely a little surprised that anything like that would do as well as it has. It’s been cool. It’s been great. We’ve been getting a lot of, doing a lot of cool stuff because of it. I’m excited for the future.

Well, it seems like there’s a lot of doom out there right but not a lot of doom metal.

Yeah, and that was sort of the thing. I’m not going to be somebody who goes and says there’s only one way to do things, there’s the right way to do things, and I think that there may be other interviews that we’ve kind of come off that way. But a lot of it is just that we want an alternative to the myriad of all the Sleep and Electric Wizard-type bands.

There’s like a million of them out there. I would just come through a town and I would do the show and I would just hear another one of those fucking bands. And that’s fine and that’s cool. Do what makes you happy. I’m not saying there aren’t bands that do that stuff really well but it just got to the point where it was like, alright, you know? Let’s try something else.

What about touring?

Last year our vocalist actually had a kid, so with his commitment to being able to do heavy touring, we just haven’t been able to do it yet. Plus the Decibel show [we played] here in Philly and of course Maryland Deathfest and then Psycho Las Vegas are our only shows booked right now. Right now our focus is after this string of shows we’re going to start buckling down and working on the new album.

Okay so in that answer you mention Psycho Las Vegas, Maryland Deathfest and the new album. These are all things I want to ask you about. First tell me about Psycho Las Vegas.

Right now it looks like we’re just going to fly and do the one thing. Depending, but that’s what I imagine we’re doing. Yeah, logistically with everything that’s going on we won’t be able to just drive out there. Or to do much touring. We’re going to be flying out and using backline. So, we’re not going to be much touring around that, unfortunately.

How did that come about, doing Psycho?

One of the people curating it is Sean Peltier, also known as Pellet. He sent us an email. He’s like, I have an offer for you guys. Do you want to come out and play with Candlemass and Blue Öyster Cult in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock Hotel in August? (Laughs) I looked at it like, psycho las vegasis this some sort of a fucking joke? Like, this big kind of obnoxious Vegas hotel with a casino and a giant guitar coming out if with a pool stage. What the fuck is this? You gotta be kidding. He sent us the official offer a few hours later, and we were like. Alright, we’ll do it. Sounds good man. We’ll do that.

Maryland Deathfest is pretty huge, what stage are you playing?

We are playing Ram’s Head Live on Thursday night, which is cool because I’ve managed to fuck up, I missed Goblin the two times they’ve come to Philly. They came twice in one year and I missed them both times. Now we’re playing Ram’s Head the same night with Goblin, which is going to be awesome. I’m really excited about that.

A year later, how do you feel about how the record came out as you are thinking of moving into the next one?

I think it’s a good record that definitely came together, I like to think relatively quickly. As far as the recording itself, I think it’s solid. There are some things I would change about it, but it’s kind of how it always goes on my end of things. The way we recorded it, it was weird.

We kind of recorded everything within small windows of time. For example, I recorded my guitar solos in Arthur‘s bedroom. There’s some mistakes I made and some things I hear back and am like, fuck, why did I think that was okay? There’s other little things, but it’s cool. It’s the first record. There’s definitely a very human element to it. I think it’s a cool — a good record for I guess a genre piece, it’s a traditional doom album.

Now, looking back on it and — not trying to overthink the future here, but I think ideally we’d like to kind of keep doing what we’re doing but do our best to put more of our own personality into it rather than just doing the groundwork that was already laid for us by bands like Candlemass — I don’t want to say totally mimicking them, well, but you can hear the influences. You know who we’re listening to. But I think in the future, we definitely want to try and put more of our own personality, our own stamp, just push forward a little bit as much as we can.

What does that sound like?

Just a lot of trial and error. We have lots of parts written. We have lots of ideas, just try and incorporate — it’s really hard to explain without sounding corny but just incorporate different sounds, riffing styles, different elements within the confines of the doom template and just try and squeeze as much in without it sounding like we’re trying too hard but also just not sounding stagnant either. It’s going to be a challenge and it’s going to be a process, but I think for at least all of my favorite bands you can be Motörhead, and that’s awesome. You can just keep dishing out a solid record after solid record and doing the same thing, but you can also be a band like Metallica back in their day. They were always moving forward, if you listen to the lead from Kill ‘em All to Ride the LIghtning. I’m not saying it’s going to be that drastic (laughs), we’re not Metallica obviously. We’re just forcing ourselves to be a little more creative and make it more of our own.

And you haven’t really started putting songs together yet?

We have a couple of songs demoed right now that James and I have written. I just finished one. We have about two or three songs that are demoed that we’re still coming together and playing as a band, then I have a ton of parts. Brooks has a song, I know one of the songs has a Mellotron on it, which I think is going to be really cool. I think we’re going to try and sneak that in there. The process is still in its infancy, but we have pretty busy schedules so we haven’t been able to work together as much but we’ve been all working by ourselves at home. We think with this next record, it’s going to be a lot more songs to choose from, in order to make just a more cohesive album.

Was the first record written similarly?

That sort of took place towards the end of the writing process. Songs like “Temple Doors,” that was the first song we ever wrote, James and I before we even had a band. It was just him and I just jamming around. We wrote it within the first — after we jammed together the first two or three times we solidified that arrangement. It was just us dicking around and jamming together. Then songs like “Heavy Riders” and “Into the Holy of Holies” they were songs I wrote pretty much by myself and then brought them to practice and we smoothed them out together.

Then James did “Byzantium” and “Will of the Ancient Call” himself then we smoothed that out. Brooks wrote “Master’s Bouquet” and then “Out of the Garden” we kind of all wrote together. So, it’s a little mix of everything and we’re going to try and keep that element. I think we’re all getting more confident in our own writing abilities.

Do you prefer it that way, or would you rather everyone in the jam room working it out?

When I write, I prefer doing it alone. I like at least to come up with most of a skeleton of a song. Then I’ll leave some loose ends that I think we can tie up as a band and smooth it over and just generally make better. Usually, I try and finish 98 percent of it myself. I like having time to myself and to be able to work at my own pace and critique things and then work together as a band to smooth out the loose ends. I prefer writing that way. I can do it and it has happened, where we get together and jam and something will start to happen, but a good way to prevent me, at least, from overthinking things but in the end sometimes I’ll go back and go, ah! If we would have just spent more time on this riff or part itcrypt-sermon-out-of-the-garden would have been better. We just shit it out. We didn’t smooth it over too much. I like to take my time.

Any other plans for the rest of this year besides writing or is it going to be pretty much putting the album together and recording?

Yeah, it’s pretty much — just focusing after these shows on writing. That happened last time too, where we started to get offers for really good shows. So shows will come along the way, I’m sure, but right now we’re going to focus on the album and do these shows. Brooks and I and everybody, James too, we’re all really excited to start working hard on the new material and getting that done.

Crypt Sermon, Out of the Garden (2015)

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