feature story: Beat #1124 16 July 2008

dismember

Most fans are pigs, appeased when artists shoot themselves in the face or choke to death on their own vomit, aborting any opportunity for the artist in question to adulterate their existing back catalogue, undermine their former essence by the release of subsequent creative transgressions, or just get fat and horrify us all. As the artist changes, so he dies. Unless, of course, the artist’s principle ideology forbids change. Unless the band rejects commercial bias, observes their own genius and laps from the same ever-flowing stream for twenty years. Unless the band is Dismember.

“Dismember is what it is. We’re not going to change that,” Dismember guitarist Martin Persson says from his home in Sweden. “I am a huge Judas Priest fan. That is a band that is the total opposite to Dismember — you never know what you get. I just listened to their latest album last week, and I got pissed off because I think it sucks so much. I don’t think many Dismember fans would pick up a new Dismember album and say that. It’s always going to sound the way it sounds.”

Dismember formed in Stockholm in 1988, suckling from the same vicious Swedish tit as Carnage, Nihilist and Entombed. The band’s themes were eternal — suicide, execution, religion (a subject vocalist Matti Kärki would later describe as “all the same shit”, although he would acknowledge Buddhists as being only a “minor nuisance”), general blood-letting, actual dismemberment and mental illness, including that leading to the “psychotic ecstasy [of] frenzied disembowelment”.

“Hideous.” “Repulsive to the senses.” “Indecent and obscene.” Claims by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, who impounded a shipment of Dismember’s first album, Like an Ever-Flowing Stream, brought the band’s British distributor to trial in 1992, and death metal under the scrutiny of the wider press, one journalist describing the sound as accurately reproducing “a vomiting fit in its final stages”. The song “Skin Her Alive” aroused a particular fascination in both the press and court. Depicting the live skinning and subsequent execution of a whore (what else?), the song was accused of inspiring “violence in the listener”, while counsel for the defense stated the lyrics described true events occurring in an apartment near Kärki’s own. Ultimately, the court listened to the album in its entirety, but since the magistrates presiding were unable to hear any actual words over Dismember’s signature “distortion on top of distortion” (even with printed lyrics), the charges were dismissed, the album cleared for release and Dismember’s distributor awarded costs. As for the band themselves, they titled their following album Indecent and Obscene — a “fuck you” in memoriam.

In the subsequent twenty years, Dismember’s lyrical content has crept away from the activity of rogue psychopaths and towards the description of military carnage, their latest album dealing with the operations of the ancient Roman Praetorian Guard, “underground [Nazi] death factories” and ghosts roaming battlefields, a concept based on one of Kärki’s own dreams, in which he claims he witnessed a field of dead soldiers locked in eternal combat; how metal.

The cover of the latest album (untitled) features a lightly blood-stained shield, laced with barbed wire, dotted with skulls and carved with the word: DISMEMBER. When I suggest that the album — indeed, the entire career of Dismember — has transcended itself, functioning as a symbol of solidarity, truth and refusal to observe market trends, Persson instantly agrees. I assume the actions are a demonstration of loyalty to Dismember’s fans; Persson corrects me. “No. You can’t think that. We do what we do.” This is the third time over the course of our conversation that Persson has said, “We do what we do,” in response to entirely different questions, confirming not only that he is awesome on a personal level, but that the band pander to no one — a sentiment echoed by guitarist David Blomqvist who, when discussing with Metal Maniacs what fans want, said, “I couldn’t care less.” (In the same interview, Blomqvist claims that a certain track on the new album is intended as a “fuck off” to new bands. Curious, Metal Maniacs asked if there were any new bands that Blomqvist does like. His answer: “No.”)

Dismember’s European tour diary, published in the German edition of Metal Hammer, intimately catalogues the band’s ongoing kebab and liquor consumption. Persson chuckles as I mention it. “I forgot we did that one! On tour it’s hard to find an internet connection, and you have to keep it updated although you’re hung over and you have no idea what to write. Was it good?” I assure him it was, but state that I require a definition of “moonshine”. “Oh, it’s booze that you make yourself in your home, here in Sweden.” I ask if it resembles wine. “No, no, no. It’s like a bad version of vodka!”