WHORETOPSY // Cum Meat The Family

If the washed out triple j-Industrial complex is McDonalds, Whoretopsy is sushi with extra wasabi. And right now, people hate anything that doesn’t look, smell, or taste like a Big Mac. What else is new?

They want their iPhones big, their wi-fi always connected, and their music as predictable as a sun rising in the East. Whoretopsy dares to wear colours in Melbourne, tell Queenslanders XXXX is shit. They prick the self-mediated bubble of illusory safety in redoubts of clockwork minds. This is why Whoretopsy draw so much ire: they plain don’t follow the rules. They don’t even follow the rules of death metal. Which is a good thing, if I’m allowed to editorialise (No. – Ed.) Talking to drummer Jake Sproule on the eve of their third long player Take My Breath Away (which we dug like a grave), we actually ask them questions about their music. Instead of shouting them down. Insisting our projections are falsifiable and concrete realities. Yanno, journalism.

HYSTERIA: You’ve got a song on the new album called Waltzing Matilda. I don’t know, I was sort of expecting a cover, I don’t know. I have no idea if it is. Tell us a little bit about some of the songs on here like It’s Raining Men and Man’s Best Friend, it seems like there’s a lot of sort of stories involved behind those.

JAKE: Yeah, I’ve have some people look at the track list and ask if there’s any covers on there some people were excited like “Oh you’re gonna play It’s Raining Men” and stuff like that. Nah. We just take the piss out of our own music.

What was the recording like this time? It seems like Whoretopsy has made headlines for the wrong reasons. Well shitty reasons, if you want to say it that way. Did you cop the same shit from studios?

No, we don’t often have trouble. Except for those few things here and there. How we recorded “Take My Breath Away” anyway is I record drums at the studio. Our guitarist mixed and mastered recorded all guitars and vocals this time. Within the industry we don’t really have much problem until we’re playing bills that sort of cross genre into other people that wouldn’t understand the humour in graphic music.

Metalheads get it. Do they get upset because they don’t get it?

I’m trying to not generalise… like a [non-metal] crowd that… a lot of music is meaningful to a lot of people. It’s literal with their life experiences and all that stuff. I think they look at Whoretopsy and they think we have some kind of agenda, an agenda that really we don’t have at all. We just making whack music for the sake of it. There’s no science or implication behind any our lyrics or band name or anything like that. We don’t condone violence or have an agenda to promote violence or anything. We’re just literally using graphic stories to be satirical and weird.

Is it sort of tiring to have to say that all the time? That you have to explain yourselves over and over again?

It’s not frustrating. It’s merely a reflex at the moment. We are having to..the more the band’s growing the more that we have to explain that. But it’s never to a metal crowd. They know what’s going on and we don’t have issues at our shows. The band has been around seven years now. We’ve played hundreds of shows. Still we have yet to see a really bad incident. A bad incident at all really. We have moshing like every other metal gig. Someone might get hurt in a mosh, like they would in any mosh. But we haven’t encouraged violence. We haven’t had any violent incidents at our shows. That I know of.

We don’t condone violence or have an agenda to promote violence or anything. We’re just literally using graphic stories to be satirical and weird.
[JAKE]

Death metal is one of those genres that’s hard to parody, because if you parody death metal it just sounds like death metal. If you have sort of humorous lyrics, is it sort of the same deal? Are you trying to get the same reaction as a cheesy horror film?

Yeah. Just like the Evil Dead type. Just ridiculous, this is stupid type thing. You look at it and you’re like well this awesome but it’s also stupid. We construct the lyrics, I know (former vocalist) Storma in the past construed the lyrics. He was the lyric writer. But we all wrote lyrics on this new album. The lyrics are constructed so they’re not in a literal direct sense. They’re all stories that are just, wrote in ridiculous settings. There’s big implications in the style of the lyrics that it’s all just ridiculous satire just like a stupid horror movie. A B-grade horror movie.

What I really love about this record, is it looks like the Cosmic Psychos are sort of torturing each other on the front. Tell us about how you got that image together.

Yeah, and it’s a bit weird because we came out with all these ideas sober. [Laughs.] Because of the themes being cheesy love songs and all that. That’s what we base our stuff after and we used to open our shows with like, what’s that Percy Sledge song?

When A Man Loves A Woman.

We like that cheesy, kind of creepy shit, you know? A death metal band that opens with love songs and stuff. And Take My Breath Away is a song we all like. From Top Gun. How can we do that? That’s how it happened, I guess.

Going back to the perceptions of Whoretopsy and metal in general, where do you think people get their wires crossed when they think of metal as angry music for angry people?

I’ve found in my experience in dealing with the scene that there… metal heads are just some of the new hippies. We don’t actually wish harm on anyone. I won’t speak for everyone, there’s some intense dudes out there. In 99 percent of the people I know they’re just lovely people. In the metal scene, it’s just full of gentle people that like to expel energy every now and then. Same with the crowd, same with the musicians. I’d be much more afraid of going to Stereosonic than I would be a Cannibal Corpse concert. Having some dude on pills or meth or something, that’s a common occurrence at those festivals. They’re still not looked at as dangerous events like a Corpse gig or Suffocation gig would be. Just because the themes are dark.

And you’ve had to cop a lot of it. In the 90s, Cannibal Corpse and Suffocation caught shit from the Christian right. Now it seems to be the left wing saying you’re sexist and misogynist and every invective under the sun. Does that hurt when you get accusations like that?

Well, we’ve never actually been approached directly.

What do you mean?

Whenever we’re being banned from shows and all that stuff it either goes direct to the promoter or to the venue. We’ve never been approached directly, but it’s a minority that do it. We know people that associate with those people. Everyone’s allowed to have their own views and opinions. We know what we are. And we’re not trying to instigate violence, nor discrimination against anyone. We’re normal people and we have normal lives. We’re doing it in the name of art and we’re not gonna let those labels they put on us effect us. I’m not saying they’re not entitled to their opinion, we’re an extreme band and if we were thinking that we weren’t going to offend anyone then we would have been just stupid because we’re doing some extreme stuff.

I think, one of the things is the band didn’t start off as a goal to provoke or offend. I think it was just a few dudes that made a slam band just for the sake of it.

The curse of success is that more people coming out of the woodwork saying they’re offended, correct?

Yeah. What’s worse is these people don’t want to talk to us, they just want us censored, full stop. I can preach and say to these people, that we’re not misogynist and we’re not sexist and we’ve got songs about killing dudes and other weird shit as well. We’re not gonna bring that up. We can say that as much as we want to these people but they’re not up for reasoning with us. They’ve targeted us, they’re not gonna listen to us or reason with us at all. They just want us gone.

If they don’t engage, don’t even want to talk to you – as  you say, it’s an either/or proposition – would they even pick you out of a crowd of anonymous metalheads?

Yeah. You know, if I attend venues that these people [who censor us] go to, i’ll probably end up drinking with someone of them. They wouldn’t know any different. It’s not like we rush into every bar we go into and hand everyone a chainsaw and go crazy. Messing each other up. What we do is literally fiction. Where are the same people protesting Stephen King?

Good point.

You know, they’re entitled to their opinions and we can see where they’re coming from and how they’re offended. It’s just they don’t wanna listen to us, reason with us, and hear our side as to why it’s not literal. Everyone we play to knows it’s not literal. But, what can you do?

Take My Breath Away is out now.