Pit Mag Interview with Pessimist by Elaine Rawlings

For those of you who are into the Underground Death Metal scene, PESSIMIST is certainly a band you are familiar with. Although, it has taken them some time to get a new CD out. Tey are armed with a new disc to shred your ears off! Entitled "Slaughtering the Faithful", this picks up perfectly where Blood For the Gods left off. We spoke with Guitarist/Vocalist and main member, Kell McLauchlin about all things going down in the PESSIMIST camp.

Pit: It has been a while since PESSIMIST has been heard from. What have you been up to? Have you been busy trying to get some tours together to support your new CD?

Kell: We're working really hard towards getting a tour together this year. At least a complete US Tour. We'll hit up Canada as well and hopefully return to Europe by 2003.

Do you know who you'll be touring with yet?

We don't really know who we'll be touring with yet...there have been some names mentioned but so far nothing concrete.

How did you hook up with Erik Rutan to record your newest CD?

Erik and I have been friends for a couple of years now. I know Steve Tucker (MORBID ANGEL's former frontman) really well. We had met through him. We ended up playing a show with MORBID during their tour with PANTERA. They did a one-off date in Rochester, NY and we ended up getting on that show as openers. Basically, after the show and just hanging out with him, we told him we had just re-signed [to Lost Disciple] for our new disc. He made us the offer to record us, he told us he chose us out of forty other bands that wanted to record with him at the time. For us, it was a great opportunity, and we were really honored to record with him.

Did you go down to his studio in Florida to record with him?

Yeah. In fact, we did it in several trips. I spent about a month and a half flying back and forth [to FL from Maryland] - Ed.

You changed up members recently. Did that make most of the writing fall on your shoulders?

I had about half of the album already written and arranged, kind of like on our previous CDs, except something different that we did this time was actually write together as a band.

Is it easier for you to write with the other members or do you prefer to have more control over the music?

Not always. It definitely keeps things fresh to have other ideas. Like I said, this is the first time where we've been able to write together as a band... we have the same kind of influences, so it works together really well. As far as control wise, I certainly wish we had more control over the album as far as the playing. We had a lot of problems with the drumming on this album. He was really fast, but he didn't have a lot of control. There's a lot of riffs on there guitar-wise, that were supposed to be really heavy, but because of the way the drums turned out it just didn't come out right.

Will you be handling a lot of the distribution of your CD?

It is interesting that you brought that up. I am starting my own label/distribution company. It just went out on the web this week. A lot of people have been giving me support for it, which has been really cool. It's called Metal-CDs.com and it will kind of be a zine on top of it being an online store and distro. I'm going to be doing a lot of trading and also working with a lot of unsigned, independent bands...

Taken from Pit Mag #39, Summer 2002