PREMIERE: COFFIN CAROUSEL // Reopen Old Wounds

Coffin Carousel, the Australian Kings of horror pop-rock, are back with their newest creation Face Melting Chunky Stuff. Hysteria sat down with Howard Von Noise, the dark carnival’s mastermind, to get the scoop on the new album as we also premiere the new single and video for Open Up Them Stitches.

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Remember back in the nineties and when you bought an album, you were in it for the whole adventure? There was that element of magical anticipation as you tore off the plastic and opened up the jewel case to study the art and memorise the booklet as you settled in and got lost in the music you love. Well it’s this sort of anticipation and excitement that Howard Von Noise, who is the brains behind Coffin Carousel, has tried to recreate. And with Face Melting Chunky Stuff it is certainly the whole package that takes you on a wild journey through his wickedly creepy mind.

“I’m an eighties kid who got into music in the nineties and albums just seemed to have a whole package to them. It wasn’t just ten of the best songs you could write. They had a journey,” Von Noise reminisces.

“I remember Metallica’s Black, and Rob Zombie, when he went solo, these albums had a vibe and it was more about presenting an art piece than a slab of a-cuts. Which I’ve got nothing against! But when it comes to me and Coffin Carousel, I want a Coffin Carousel album to be a package, to be an art piece and for listeners to experience the whole ride. You know, just put it on and get lost in it for an hour,” he explains.

This is not a new concept of writing for the band either, as they have approached both their debut LP Between Death & Dead and now their follow-up release, Face Melting Chunky Stuff in the same way. The newest album, which drops on Friday September 13, houses 17 original tracks and skits, as well as a bonus track, a horror-rock-pop version of Belinda Carlisle’s pop hit Leave A Light On.

“I love eighties and nineties pop anthems!” Von Noise says of the decision to include the cover of Leave A Light On. “I thought it was a cool track that I wanted to have fun with and see if I could make it more spooky and rocky.” His version of the pop hit fits the theme of this album, where Von Noise has taken a much lighter approach to his writing, both lyrically and musically.

“With the last album I had a really heavy lyric theme. I took a lot of life experiences and challenges that I had gone through over the years and my therapy for that, was to put it into my art and create an album,” Von Noise explains. “But on this album I wanted to have a lot more fun. All the live shows we’ve been doing, we’ve been presenting ourselves as a band that has a good time, there’s no real serious message, we just want to rock out and entertain a crowd and with this album I wanted to make it more of that sort of appeal,” he continues.

Coffin Carousel have also chosen the second track Open Up Them Stitches as the first single off the album, with the video premiering with Hysteria today.

“Visually, we wanted to create something that tied in lyrically with the track. Open Up Them Stitches is about that human tendency to let something naturally heal, but there’s still something that makes you want to rip out the stitches and understand the wound. We also wanted to make it look like an eighties video game, with lots of colours and just again, have some fun,” Von Noise explains of the track and the clip.

The clip is further proof that Coffin Carousel really haven’t taken themselves too seriously with Face Melting Chunky Stuff. It’s an entertaining album with even the name, which was inspired by an old post on social media, leaving no question about the kind of music you’re going to hear.

“I had all the songs recorded and was in the mixing process and I had this short list of titles but they were all just so serious and I was thinking, these titles don’t match the vibe of the album,” Von Noise says of how he came up with the name.

“But then I had something come up in my Facebook memories, it was from years ago when I saw Mastodon at Festival Hall and I made a post saying how the show was so ‘face-melting’. And so that memory had come up on Facebook and I was like ‘face-melting’ ok, and then I don’t know where I got chunky stuff from, but I do consider the band’s sound to be chunky,” he laughs. “I mean it’s just fun! We’re not here trying to be brutal and serious, it’s just a chunky face melting experience,” he laughs again.

Von Noise is also pretty passionate about having something different for each release Coffin Carousel puts out, and with this album there will be a 24 page booklet to enhance the artistic experience.

“I’ve always thought that if the internet turned off tomorrow and everything is in this digital cloud, then your music doesn’t exist,” Von Noise says. “So even if there is only 100 CDs out in circulation, then at least my music exists!” he laughs.

Thankfully, the internet hasn’t switched off just yet.