Pharaoh got together along time ago in ’97, that’s when it all started. I had just started doing my ‘zine at the time, Feast or Famine and through that I met another guy who was local to here named Chris Black who did a ‘zine called Word of Mouth. I had just discovered this crappy little hard rock / metal type cd store tucked away in some shitty little town and they had copies of his ‘zine out and I picked it up and I got in touch with him through email and sent him a copy of my ‘zine and he liked it and then we started corresponding. I knew that he was working with a band called Dawnbringer which was more like a black metal, thrash metal thing.

He emailed me and said that him and a friend of his were gonna start a band that was more traditional Iron Maiden, Metal Church type of stuff and wanted a second guitarist and knew I was really into old school Power Metal and so he asked if I’d be interested and I just said, “Yeah, sure!” I actually met Chris at the first Pharaoh rehearsal, we went over to the other guitarist’s house, this guy named Keith. Chris and Keith sorta formed the band at a party, they were listening to a Saxon album and they got nostalgic or something cos Keith was playing in a Death Metal band called Final Prayer, and I guess they both decided they wanted to play something a little more rootsier, more like what they listened to when they were younger. You gotta have two guitarists for that sort of thing so I went over to Keith’s house and that’s where I met him and Chris and we just sat in Keith’s bedroom with a couple of amps. It was kind of a funny situation cos Keith had tuned his guitar down to like C or something like that, really low for death metal, and I just had a standard tuning and we were just totally out of whack while writing these riffs and I was playing in these really strange positions cos we were basing them off of his tuning so I couldn’t use any open strings and it was kind of fucked up. Anyway, each of those guys had brought two or three riffs and they taught em to me and started trying to patch them together into a song, and I came up with a chorus riff, and then we needed a riff for the bridge and I came up for that and that was it, it was more or less ready to go. In about two and a half hours after meeting these guys we had written Slaves although it obviously didn’t have vocal melodies or lyrics.

The next day we went to Keith’s practice room where he practiced with Final Prayer and played the whole thing with Chris on drums instead of bass, he’s left handed so he had to play the right handed bass Jimi Hendrix style, you know upside down and stuff like that, so at this little rehearsal he played drums and Keith had some guy there who had an 8 track recorder and we recorded real quick a little demo for this thing and that was it. Sometime while Keith was recording his solo or something, I got in my mind this melody that became the chorus, the actual vocal melody for the chorus and I had this in my head for years and years, no lyrics but I knew what words had to rhyme. So that’s how that worked out, that was the beginning of Pharaoh and at that point it moved kind of slowly. I started writing some more riffs and got together to show him this stuff and the next thing you know he calls Chris and says, “You know, I really don’t want to be in Pharaoh anymore.” I never really got a full total explanation as to why, its either he didn’t like me, or my riffs or didn’t think that his riffs and my riffs wouldn’t work together or something like that. I never really took it personal and he was cool about it, I’ve seen him plenty of times and he’s got some other bands going. So he got out pretty early, just a couple of months so then it was just down to me and Chris and at that point it became a very slow moving adventure. Chris was in college at the time and he knew a guy named Chris Kerns that played bass and was really into Iron Maiden so he asked him to join and I just said, “Cool,” and started working on some more songs. Sometime in early ’99 we got together for a rehearsal at my place and that’s one of the very few times that the three of us have actually played together in the same room. We worked on Slaves, and we had Solar Flight. I had the basic riffs for that and Chris Black is real good with arrangements and was saying, “Ok this riff and this riff then this riff,” and wrote it down on a piece of paper and we’re all just staring at this trying to remember what order it gets played in. We also did Flash in the Dark and started working on an Iron Maiden cover. This is another early piece of the puzzle, Chris Black at the time had his own label called Twilight Records and it was with this label that he released Dawnbringer stuff on initially. He decided he’d do an Iron Maiden tribute, this was at the beginning of that whole tribute phase that lasted a few years and burned out. So he was gonna do a tribute and his cool idea was to make it a double disc set, the first disc would be the covers and the second would be an original by every band. Ostensibly the idea of the tribute thing is to get people into new bands through old music and whatnot so I thought this was a pretty cool idea cos anyone can make an Iron Maiden song sound good but who’s really got the goods.

We decided to do Aces High and we were rehearsing with that and it came down to he was getting a lot of submissions for this thing and the album was nearly filled up and we still didn’t have anything recorded and we didn’t have a singer so we auditioned a couple of people and it wasn’t that hot it was ok and we had found someone we had been thinking about going with but ultimately didn’t, and while all this was happening there was a band called Psycho Scream which Tim Aymar sang in and the guitarist was a guy named Jim Dofka. Jim and I had become friend also through my ‘zine and he and Tim were having a fight and they were sorta broken up, Tim was not in Pyscho Scream but I guess they were still on speaking terms. Jim had heard our instrumental stuff that we’d recorded and was like, “”I’m sure Tim would do it if you asked,” and I was just like YEA, cos I love Tim from Psycho Scream, I thought he was just a fantastic singer and so I was really excited at the idea. I would have loved to have asked Jim but I wasn’t about to go, “Hey uhh can you hook me up with your old singer?” He gave me Tim’s number and I called him up and asked him about it and he said, “Sure, why not?” I got out some tapes and recorded his voice and that was it we had that song. This was actually before Control Denied came out and in fact when we got together with Tim the first time Control Denied wasn’t even a band. They had gotten together in 95 or 96 and recorded a demo then Chuck, maybe cos he decided he needed label interest or something decided he would do another Death album, Sound of Perseverance. Tim was just left twiddling his thumbs in Pittsburgh so he had nothing going on and he lent us some of his time. Then it took a VERY long to write and record and re-record After the Fire, it finally came out in 2003. Between when we started that album I started recording rhythm tracks in May of 99, we didn’t finish until sometime in late 2002 so yea it was a long process.

Yes and no. After we did the Iron Maiden thing we knew that we were gonna do an album. What we did first was when we recorded the sessions with Aces High and Solar Flight, we also recorded two other songs, Slaves and Flash of the Dark, but when I had gone out two get Tim’s vocals he didn’t have time to do those last two so what we ended up with was two songs with Tim and two instrumental songs. We up a little demo with the stuff and sent it out to a bunch of labels and no one was really interested. I think maybe Metal Blade wrote back and said, “Eh it sounds good and when you get some more songs let us know,” and that was really it so we said Fuck it and decided to do it ourselves. We started writing more songs, maybe five or six months and we had written an album’s worth of songs and we got together once to rehearse, me and the two Chris’ got together at my place and we barely made it through each of the songs cos we didn’t have a lot of time and then we booked some studio time to start recording. I guess part of the reason it took a long time is by this point, well Chris Black is always optimistic on how long its gonna take to record anything. He booked us a certain number of days and it took him three quarters of that time just to do drum tracks, when he expected it to take a day. I recorded most of my rhythm guitars at that point and then we had to leave, we ran out of time. The studio was in State College Pennsylvania and I had to go back home which was two and a half hours away and those guys were just graduating so none of us were near the studio or lived near one another. So we booked some more time and I went back and recorded my guitars again and then Chris decided he wasn’t happy with his drums so he went back too and re-recorded all his drum parts over everything else which is not something that happens too often usually you START with the drums. He just wiped clean all the old drums and put in the new ones. I also had to record all my solos and there were little things to touch up and while we were doing all of this none of us were paying attention to the vocals or the lyrics so even after we recorded everything with really crappy rough mixes we had no vocals planned except for Solar Flight. So then we had to write lyrics and melodies and it took us a long time to do it, not because it was hard, just because maybe we weren’t motivated, or we weren’t together, who knows what it was it just took awhile. When we finally got all this recorded we sent it off to Tim to record. A couple of those songs, Now is the Time and Forever Free I had given to Tim and told him to write the lyrics write the melodies, do what you gotta do. That took him awhile so it was just this long process and finally he got his stuff recorded, we got it back and we had to mix it and again Chris didn’t book enough time so we had to mix it over two sessions a month, month and a half apart so it was just a slow thing that with a little better planning and motivation it could have been a lot better. That’s really why it took so long, the whole album was done in fits and spasms but if you condense all the amount of time in the studio it was two weeks tops.

Yea I’m happy with the finished result. There’s obviously some things I’d like to change after all is said and done. We were kinds rushed and I didn’t have time to experiment with my guitar tone I recorded direct I didn’t use an amp for both the rhythms and the solos and I think the rhythm came out sounding pretty cool its got this mid “brown” sound. The lead tone could be better, I’m not really a gearhead or been interested in tone as a private player sitting around in my room so I didn’t know what to do and the guy engineering the album wasn’t that much help I don’t think he’d recorded other metal bands very much and definitely didn’t have a good sense on how to get the sound of tones we’d like. So the guitars sounded a little thin and there’s things here and there but overall I’m happy with it. It cost very very little money to record that album, tops we spent $3500 on the whole thing. For that amount of cash I’m definitely happy with it (laughs). It comes off sounding kinda old, definitely not a modern sound to it but that seems to dovetail pretty well with the kinda music being played on the album so yea I’m happy about it. I’m certainly happy with the way Tim turned out I have no complaints there he sounds amazing.

He’s never heard Iron Maiden? It’s pretty hard to sell Pharaoh if you haven’t heard Iron Maiden (laughs).

I’d tell him its kinda like Iron Maiden but a lot ballsier. Iron Maiden is about a lot of high notes, falsetto and that’s not what Pharaoh’s about. Pharaoh’s is definitely a more manlier take on Iron Maiden... If that doesn’t do it what do I gotta do? Beat him up? He’s smaller than me I’m assuming. I’ll rough him up and take his lunch money and if that’s not enough I’ll burn him a copy (laughs).

I started in 98 and got that gig through Chris Black as well. He had been writing for a year or two before me and was friends with Jeff Wagner and had been doing his own ‘zine for awhile, terrific writer with lots of great ideas. When Jeff Wagner came onboard that’s about when Chris started writing for him. I had been reading Metal Maniacs since the first issue it’s always been one of my favorite magazines in the US and in my early metal years it was very important to my development. Even when I was doing my ‘zine I always thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write for Metal Maniacs,” and after the Pharaoh thing got going and I had gotten to be better friends with Chris he introduced me to Jeff Wagner. What happened was Jeff wanted to do this three part story on the instruments of heavy metal, guitar, bass, drums, and he played bass and Chris obviously plays drums, but surprisingly enough there wasn’t anyone on the staff at the time that played guitar. So Chris told him, “Matt from Pharaoh plays guitar and writes his own ‘zine,” and Jeff was familiar with Feast or Famine and the time and thought that was a good idea. I kinda came on as a one off, I did that article and there wasn’t any promise of more to come but I kept in touch with Jeff and kept doing Feast to Famine. I think it was the second issue of Feast or Famine that had a really, really long Sodom interview like totally nitty gritty, everything you ever wanted to know about Sodom ever because they’ve been one of my favorite bands forever. The next time a Sodom album came out, Code Red it was actually getting released in the US and Jeff wanted to do a Sodom story and immediately thought of me cos of the article in Feast or Famine so he asked me to do the Sodom interview (for Metal Maniacs) so I did that and somehow I kept getting more stuff. This was around late 98 and Power Metal was starting to become trendy, the Hammerfall album had been out for about a year and there were other bands out there like that starting to pop up and there was a little bit more of Progressive Metal that was available on domestic labels. Since this had been so out of vogue for so long none of the other writers on the staff had any real familiarity with any of it so I think I kind of got on that at the right time and early on most of what I was writing about was melodic stuff. I did reviews and interviews and got em in on time and Jeff asked for more so it worked out really well and I’ve been writing for em regularly ever since.

I think I might’ve interviewed Steel Prophet twice for Metal Maniacs and for that matter Tad Morose twice as well. Oh hey this is a really cool story about Tad Morose… I knew that Undead was coming out in Europe, in fact it may have already been out over there, the promos were out at the very least. A friend of a friend made me a cd-r of the promo and I got in touch with the publicist at Century Media and I was like, “This Tad Morose album is awesome I absolutely HAVE to interview them,” and I pitched it to Jeff Wagner who I guess knew them and told me to do the story. They hooked me up with the story and the interview and it turns out that Century Media was not going to release the album in the US and the publicist was like, ”Fuck, Matt Johnson is doing the article in Metal Maniacs, you gotta put it out now,” and THEY DID! I’m sure there were other contributing factors and maybe the publicist is blowing smoke up my ass but I really do appreciate that story and like to thank I’m at least partly responsible for getting their album out here so then I got to interview them again when the next album came out. I’ve interviewed a lot of cool bands for Metal Maniacs, a lot of bands that definitely would have not made it into that magazine if it wasn’t for me. Recently I did this Gordian Knot article and that was supposed to be a “Fast Forward” that column that’s 1000 words and I submitted a 6000 word story to Liz. I told her, “I know this is supposed to be a Fast Forward but this is the greatest Gordian Knot you are ever going to read in your life it’s totally awesome and you must print it.” She agreed it was the best and must print it but asked me if I could get it down to like 4000- 4200 words and I turned in EXACTLY 4200 words including my name at the bottom. (Laughs) So yea, it ended up as a five page color spread on Gordian Knot, they’re never gonna get coverage like that in the States. I’m really happy I’ve been able to push a lot of the underground bands and one of the reasons I don’t show up in the magazine as much as I probably could is I’m not as interested in the big bands cos there’s somebody else to do it. It seems to me the best bands are the ones that are still a little beneath the surface, the ones that haven’t quite made it in the US. That’s what I’m always trying to dig out. Occasionally I get asked to do something like Nevermore and I’m not gonna turn it down so yea, sometimes I do bigger bands but usually it’s the smaller stuff, I think I did the first Soilwork interview for those guys too.

Oh no absolutely, I did it at Prog Power. Rage is one of my absolute favorite number one bands, and I have three thousand, thirty two hundred cds and have more cds by Rage than any other band by a lot. I think I have probably at this point forty five Rage cds, cos they have this amazing amount of releases and I have all the E.P.’s, the German, Japanese, American versions of the albums so I get all the bonus tracks, I just love Rage. I had never seen them before so seeing them at Prog Power was definitely one of the highlights of my heavy metal life. As we were gearing up for that part of the show I was drinking a bit, getting excited, and they played that awesome set with tons of great songs, they played FIRESTORM for crying out loud, and I was just rapturous with joy and as they (security) was pushing everybody out of the venue after they played I fought through the crowd and found Glenn Harveston and told him, “You gotta take me to meet Peavy,” and so he was just like, “Aw, c’mon,” and takes me backstage. There’s Peavy and I’m talking to him and I was literally just reduced to this snickering fanboy. I was just, “oh oh you’re so great, can you sign this, you’re so awesome,” so I basically lost my shit for Peavy. That’s cool you know, that’s why we do this sort of thing. If I didn’t like metal this much I couldn’t put in the effort I do to write about it and certainly wouldn’t waste as much money as I do on Feast or Famine and its something that’s just an enormous part of my life. So yea, there’s bands like that that just totally disarm me and I have no idea what to say. I think I’m gonna be meeting Tore from Conception and Ark in a week or so and that will probably have me beside myself I imagine. There’s not too many bands at this point that can do that to me and even a lot of bands I really like if I’m no interviewing them I don’t know what to say. For the most part I’m not willing to say,” I think you guys are great,” and if I don’t have interesting to offer I’m not gonna bug em. I’d probably say Hi, or that I’m a longtime fan. When I met Tom Angel Ripper from Sodom, that was another fanboy experience as well. There’ve been a few others so yea it still happens and I imagine it’ll continue to happen.

Constantly. . . Mars Volta is the number one cd that’s ruled my player for a long damn time. I got the cd several months ago and I’ve been listening to it more or less nonstop since then. It’s not really a metal album though, it’s heavy but its not really metal but I don’t think there’s that many metalheads that can’t appreciate that album. Its heavy metal in the way that Led Zeppelin is, its really walking that line and they’re not trying to be a part of the heavy metal scene but what they are doing has a lot of parallels with what the best metal bands are doing and that album is just totally ruling the world. Lately though since Prog Power, I came home with piles and piles of discs, and that’s more and less what I’ve been listening to since then. Some of the good stuff I got was the new Lanfear, that’s a really good disc. My friend John Frank made me a cd-r of the band Mythologic, they’re really cool. They are kind of this semi-technical take on Lacuna Coil, I say that because the singer is a female singer and sounds a lot like Cristina Scabbia, but the music is very complex. It’s progressive, really intricate stuff and that’s always been the downside to Lacuna Coil, yea they’re a good band but they don’t really have a lot to offer. So, that Mythologic cd is really cool, this band Voyager is good too. They are sort of a fluffy Prog Metal band but pretty entertaining… (pause) Like I said, I got so much stuff I’m drawing a blank right now.

It goes without saying I’m listening to more than five. I got thirty or forty cds from ProgPower so I’ve definitely got plenty to listen to. As for the next big thing, it kinda hasn’t happened yet. If Ark releases another album I expect that’ll be it. Freak Kitchen is a really really impressive band, Move has been out for about a year or so and that;s still something I listen to pretty regularly. Freak Kitchen is a pretty unique band and that’s a rare commodity these days. I would rate them pretty high on the list of stuff I like now. I don’t know when it is though when someone will come along and shake things up. It’s been a few years since there was a wave of really exciting music but its bound to happen and someone is going to have to do it.

Cradle of Filth. They’re ok, I like some of their stuff but they are massively overrated. Hammerfall of course, who are totally terrible. They’re a band I have absolutely no use for. I actually did interview the band back for the first issue of Feast or Famine and I think I even went so far to say that Joacim has a good voice. It was one of those indiscretions of youth, something I wouldn’t do now. It was definitely a lot more exciting back then. There wasn’t a lot of stuff coming out like that and I think I was kinda caught up like a lot of people with this perceived return of melodic metal so yea I was into that first Hammerfall. But now man, they’re just terrible. I think In Flames keeps getting worse. They used to be an amazing band. They still are pretty good live, I mean it’s not like their music is TOTAL crap, it’s at least partially crap though. I also heard a few songs from the new Iron Maiden that didn’t sound so hot. I’ll get the album though it’s just not a top priority. I’m not saying that Iron Maiden are completely overrated it’s just that they are well past their prime and even the best album that they could put out now is gonna be pretty low on the list of great melodic albums coming out now. I think the new Helloween is rotten, I like a few tracks but the rest I just can’t get into. I want Weiki to leave he’s just terrible, the band would be better with NO original members. I think that covers a good number of overrated bands there. If I went to the wall of cd’s I’m sure I could find many more.

It may come as no surprise that being the editor of Feast or Famine and a contributor to Metal Maniacs doesn’t entitle me to “wild experiences.” I don’t think I’ve had a lot of those for sure. Sorry to be a letdown there, I can’t think of any experiences I’d go so far as to call them wild. I certainly had a lot of good times but there’s no women taking their shirts off that’s for sure (laughs). As for coolest guy, Jim Dofka is just about the coolest heavy metal guy that I know. It’s a perpetual shame that his bands don’t go anywhere. Psycho Scream just broke up again, him and Tim got back together and they even recorded a new album and that’s just sitting on their hard drive somewhere and that’s just beyond a shame. Psycho Scream when they existed were probably the best band in America, unbelievable stuff. I think Tim did a great job in Pharaoh but those two guys had been working together for a long, long time and Jim definitely knows how to get more out of Tim than I do. Jim is just all around great, he’s got a bunch of projects, he’s a really fun guy, he is definitely one of the coolest people I know. Ron Jarzombek is also a really cool guy I like him a lot. Martin Gagne from Oblivion, when their third album Cyvervoid came out they were having a big release party in Montreal. It’s kinda hard to understand Oblivion in Montreal if you don’t live there cos they were fucking huge there. They could play for thousands and thousands of people in Montreal but couldn’t get a record deal elsewhere, they were truly one of the greatest metal bands ever. I got in touch with this guy and asked if I could come up to see their kick off party but I couldn’t find a hotel room cos there was this big Formula 1 event and he was like, “Yeah you can come crash with me.” I had never met the guy, only talked to him two or three times through email and he’s letting me hang out with the band and invited me to his house. There have been a bunch of people that are just really alright. As far as assholes, I don’t know if I’ve had to deal with anyone who was just a complete asswipe although in terms of interviews I would say Vorphalak from Samael is pretty low on the list. It was the first interview I ever did and I was really nervous but I had a lot of good interview questions ready, this was when Passage just came out, and I would ask this brilliant question that he could rightly take off on for ten minutes and he would answer with two words or a, “Yeah.” It was really frustrating and made for a super crappy interview… ACTUALLY, now that I think of it I can think of one gigantic fucking asswipe and that is D.D. Verni from Overkill. In one of the first or second issues of my ‘zine I did a review for one of their crappy albums, Necroshine, Killing Kind, whatever was out at the time and I said that, “Overkill used to be great. But now they fucking suck.” The thing with Overkill though is that if you see them live you can’t hate them because they are so great on stage. Even though they are putting out crappy albums and writing terrible songs when they play them onstage it’s like all is forgiven, they totally redeem themselves. So even though they had put out crap I still wanted to support them and Overkill was coming to town and I set up an in person interview which is not something I do too often. It was backstage in Philadelphia with Blitz and I was sitting up there with him doing the interview and things are going good. Blitz is REALLY cool, in fact he should be ranked high among the coolest of metal. So we’re just talking and he says, “What magazine do you do this for?” so I told him Feast or Famine and gave him a copy. The first one on the back cover what I did was make Metallica paper dolls. They had just cut their hair at the time and were wearing Armani suits and fancy shoes and I had these paper dolls with Metallica looking like a bunch of yutzes and gave them leather jackets and old Danzig shirts and long hair wigs so you could dress them up. It was pretty funny and he saw that and was cracking up. D.D. and the rest of the band were milling around and saw that and Blitz was like, “Hey D.D. check this out!” and gives a copy to him. I went about with the interview and it didn’t even occur to me that I just handed to Overkill a copy of the ‘zine that had a review that said Overkill fucking blows! (laughs) D.D. muscles his way over, he’s like five foot tall five two tops, and was asking, “Who’s the asshole that writes the reviews for this thing?” I was like ,”Uhh, I would be that asshole,” and he launches off in this fucking tirade about how I’m a dick and saying, “Fucking assholes like you want us to write Years of Decay over and over, you’re just stuck in the eighties,” and on and on and Tim Mallare the drummer, he is gigantic. He’s gotta be like 6’4, 6’5, real big guy and he was looming over D.D. with his chest puffed out and the other guitarist was there and they were all scowling at me and I was thinking, “FUCK! I’m gonna get rolled by Overkill!” but Blitz just shook it off, “I don’t fucking care man,” and D.D. just yells “GRAAH” and throws the magazine down and he and the rest of the guys leave. Blitz was like, “Well I don’t fucking care, I’ve been in this business long enough to not give a crap about that,” but it totally disarmed me I had no brains left. I was quaking in my boots thinking that Overkill was gonna beat me up, I couldn’t think straight or ask anymore good questions. Even though I had all these things I wanted to ask Blitz they were gone from my mind, the interview ended shortly thereafter. So D.D. was a big dick then. BUT, it doesn’t end there! What I did about that, since I was interviewing Blitz I had the whole thing on tape and transcribed it and when I printed the interview I printed the whole interaction between me and D.D. I had a friend of mine illustrate me and D.D. in boxing gloves and I printed that along with the interview and when it came out I gave a copy to Dan from Hades and he made sure to give it to the guys in Overkill. I was at another Overkill show and another friend of mine Jeff Rappaport who does Metal-Rules magazine. He was doing an interview then. When I originally interviewed them I had these wire rimmed glasses and Jeff had similar glasses at the time. He was backstage interviewing Blitz and D.D. was looking at him funny and Jeff told em, “Hey I saw a really great interview with you guys in Feast or Famine,” and D.D. goes, “HEY! Are you the fucking prick that did that?!!” and he was just, “No, No it wasn’t me.” The thing is this was a year and a half, two years later and D.D. was still smoldering over that whole event. (laughs) So yeah, I would say D.D. is the number one asshole I have had to deal with in my years as a heavy metal journalist.

I would say music is more rewarding. It’s certainly more personal and while there’s a good valid reason for metal journalism and people benefit from it, they discover new bands cos of reviews, there’s not the emotional connection between the journalism and the artist. In music and the artist its different. I worked really hard for the songs I wrote for the Pharaoh album and it definitely makes me happy that there are people who like it, we’ve got a lot of good reviews. We haven’t sold a ton of records but I didn’t really expect to. I’m happy that anybody likes it and happy to be involved with the musicians so I would say that that is definitely more rewarding. I don’t want to shortchange the journalistic experience cos that’s been really cool too. I’ve met people that said they’d been reading my stuff for a long time or that they wouldn’t have heard Spiral Architect if it wasn’t for me. I talked to Jeff Wagner and made him listen to Lost Horizon and they thought it was crap and I was just like, “No man that ain’t crap that’s great,” and I forced them into going back to it. There has been a lot of really great experiences as a journalist too. It is definitely rewarding it doesn’t have the same kind of feedback though, I’ve never gotten fan mail as a writer. I would say that music is definitely more rewarding but I’ve been doing reviews and interviews for such a long time that its kind of hard to really say at this point.

This is like Metal-Sludge.

Ok I must be mistaken (laughs). It’s been awhile since I’ve been there.

Just speaking to his abilities as a guitar player he’s obviously capable of playing very fast. I think that he is one of those guys that have neglected the feel aspect in order to play so fast so I would say he’s maybe a six or a seven. He’s talented and can do some neat shit and there was some crazy solos on that album and I like what he does with effects. He does a lot with a whammy pedal, Mattias Eklund can do it with no pedal but its neat that he’s experimenting with effects and technology. He seems like a cool guy, I just wish his band wasn’t so godawful.

Jeff Loomis is amazing. He never ceases to amaze me. I was kind of let down though with Dead Heart in a Dead World cos it really sounded like to me that he just bought himself a brand new seven string and thought he was the first guy to go chugga-chugga on the B string. I was a little less than impressed with that but overall he’s a monster player, a really inventive lead player, he's got speed and great tone and feel, I’d say he’s probably a nine.

He’s a nine or ten easy. I’m coming to a point where I have less appreciation with these guys that have singular styles cos everything he does sounds more or less the same. It’s immensely impressive if you’ve seen him play, its really hard to find fault with his technique. I would like to hear him open up a little more but he hasn’t had a lot of opportunities to do that he hasn’t had a lot of guest appearances or anything. He is definitely an amazing guitarist. There was a Rush tribute a few years ago on Magna Carta one of those things where there’s ten different musicians on every song and he did Analog Kid. His guitar solo on there takes the cake it is probably my favorite Mike Romeo guitar solo and he also writes great riffs. He often gets overlooked there because he’s such a good lead player but he writes some pretty heavy and awesome stuff.

Jasun’s awesome too. He has I would say less of his own style, maybe it’s cos there’s only a couple of Zero Hour albums out. If I didn’t know him and he just started playing I don’t know if I would recognize it as him playing whereas Jeff Loomis and Michael Romeo, if they just plugged in and started going I could tell from another room who it probably was, Jasun probably not. He writes great riffs and is an immensely talented guy. I would say a seven, seven and a half.

Back in the day he was fucking terrific at rhythm. There’s a lot of lead players that can’t play rhythm that well. Needless to say, now he’s totally useless. If we’re rating him now based on his current status he’s a two. He is completely terrible. If you’re gonna rate him in his prime just on his rhythm skills he’d get a six or a seven. I know he’s played solos but they’re not good. When he was on the top he was doing something useful. As a guitarist, a six.

I think Dan is a talented guy but I don’t particularly rate his guitarwork. He writes some good riffs but what’s he doing that’s all that interesting or new. As a songwriter he rates high but as a guitarist he’s anybody. He doesn’t have any special technique or anything that makes his stuff special. Anybody can play his guitar riffs and probably better so I’d say he’s a five.

There was a time where I would have rated him a lot higher than I do now. That’s a lot of things coming into play that have nothing to do with his abilities as a guitar player, I think that he does Arch Enemy mainly because it’s successful and makes money. It’s pretty obvious his heart is in Spiritual Beggars and that kind of music and honestly its better off there. He’s one of these guys that achieved a really high level of technical ability and decided to cast it off in favor of bluesy playing and its like he sacrificed technique for feel. That’s OK he’s still a great player but his peak was Heartwork and maybe the first Arch Enemy album. A good player but his star is definitely falling, I’ll give him a six.

Dave Murray is great, he writes catchy solos. He’s not as good as Adrian but you don’t get to be that famous for nothing. He’s been around forever and written some impressive tunes and has played a lot of cool solos. The first half of the Aces High solo is almost as good as the second half. He can almost make it with Adrian but I wouldn’t recognize his playing instantly although I would recognize Adrian’s. His importance to heavy metal can’t be understated and I’ll give him a six and a half.

A ten? Ron Jarzombek from Watchtower and Spastic Ink. Mattias Eklund a ten too. Actually those two would be elevens. Those guys have minds like Mozart. Their understanding of music is so thorough and deep and their abilities as musicians really are unequaled. They are a one in a million type talents to me and both can play intensely complicated shit and both can play with feel and have recognizable styles. They are easy tens or above and there’s not many people I would say that with. Steinar from Spiral Architect is probably a ten. There’s not a lot of guitarist out there I’d say rank that high. Chris Poland I would think gets a ten he is amazing in every way.

I would actually say the new stuff is worse than the old stuff. Mallcore is worse and here’s why. I mean they’re both terrible, I’m not going to deny that but those bands have had a profound effect on underground metal. When you have something that is heavy to whatever extent, let’s say that cock rock is heavier than what some people were listening to otherwise, it creates this environment where people are receptive to heavy music. At the core of that fanbase you have usually young kids who have no outside interest, they’re not helping metal out but as you go out you get people because they like this heavy band they are willing to listen to another heavy metal band. You get this periphery that is amenable to the kind of crossover that is really good for heavy metal. The success of Shadows Fall lets say for example, they aren’t a band I love but they aren’t a bad band or In Flames. In Flames has certainly benefited from the existence of the popularity of mallcore and that’s fine. Then once you get someone into In Flames you’re not so far from getting them into Soilwork or even Withering Surface, actually good bands. You had the same thing going on in the eighties with the cock rock bands. There was this really fuzzy area between hair metal and real metal. You don’t have to go that far to get from Winger or Hurricane to Fifth Angel and then from Fifth Angel to Sanctuary. I think that the reason cock rock is just a little better is unlike nu-metal it doesn’t totally reject musicianship. A lot of those bands had great guitar players, Whitesnake had Steve Vai in it! Reb Beach from Winger was a phenomenal guitar player and for that matter Al Morgenstein the drummer was just an unholy drummer. Even though those band’s music was stupid and the lyrics were retarded they were still musician based bands. Obviously Poison wasn’t going to break any new musical grounds, neither was Motley Crue but a lot of those bands were fundamentally made up of talented guys. I don’t think that there’s a lot of talent in mallcore and as you move away from that popular center the music that is going to appeal now is fundamentally less musical as it was in the eighties. That’s why I see this new kind of mall metal is a worse thing but it’s gonna explode and collapse just like hair metal. Don’t get me wrong they both blow but I think that this nu-metal is a lot worse.

The next new thing is gonna be different you cant envision it. It used to be that Warrant would seem to be on MTV for an eternity it would never go away and all of a sudden it did. It wasn’t even as instantaneous as that but in reflection it was, it was like one day there was Slaughter and the next Nirvana. There wasn’t even a couple of years there between where one died out and the next one came up. All these terrible music phenomenon’s seem like they won’t leave but I remember when I thought I’d never hear the end of New Kids on the Block and then suddenly I did and I haven’t heard them ever again and I thought there would never be a day when I wouldn’t stop hearing Backstreet Boys songs and now, when was the last time anyone heard anything by them. It all comes and it all goes. So something new is going to come and clean the slate as far as mallcore is concerned.

Yes. I think that Pharaoh will play live. In fact just in the past few weeks I’ve had a number of people interested in helping make that a reality. I don’t know when it will happen it might only happen once but I would love to have Pharaoh play live. It would be nice to get ourselves on one of the American festivals, maybe a shitty opening slot at Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles or the pre party at Prog Power or something like that would be great. I would love to do it and everybody in the band would love to do it but it’s difficult because we don’t live in the same states. I don’t know how practically we would be able to arrange that but I definitely think there will be some Pharaoh shows.

Glenn has the Pharaoh cd and hasn’t ever mentioned it to me so I figured he wasn’t too impressed and I don’t want to press it. There’s nothing worse than someone you know and like asking you about their awful album (laughs), and if Glenn doesn’t like it that’s totally cool with me but I don’t want to force him into a position where he either has to pretend he likes it or where he breaks my heart (laughs). If anything I’ll just let the word be known that Pharaoh wouldn’t mind playing one of these things and if he wants to bring us on he does and if not he doesn’t. There’s never gonna be a shortage of great bands for Glenn to put on for Prog Power and honestly, if he puts Pharaoh on there’s probably another band that deserves it more that doesn’t go (laughs). We’ll see, I wouldn’t hold my breath for Prog Power V but we might do some shows. I expect if we do they’ll be based around where we live in the North East Philly are and up to New York and then probably some around the Chicago area.

It will not. The plan is to release the follow up one year from now in September 2004. It seems far but it really isn’t considering we haven’t gotten started. We have songs written but not lyrics or melodies and then there the recording as well. In order for us to get the album out in September we have to have it finished by May. That’s what the label is targeting and I’m all for it I think having a deadline will light a fire under our ass. I have a lot of stuff written and it needs a little bit of arrangement. Chris Kerns has written some songs, Chris Black has written some songs so we have a lot of material we just need to hash it out so we can learn it and whatnot. We’ll hopefully be smarter recording it than we were the last time as well so expect some new Pharaoh sometime next fall in 2004.

I’ve heard that a lot but I never ever complain about short good albums. It’s really hard to write seventy minutes of GOOD music, almost no one can do it yet so many bands insist on doing just that. I’m pretty happy with the forty one minutes that we got there’s not any wasted time on that. Peace Sells was only thirty five minutes long and that has I Ain’t Superstitious. I think that the medium of cds has unduly stretched out the expectations of people. When music came on records it was thirty or thirty five minutes for a full length album. It’s really hard to write that much good music and I don’t think people should try to do it just because they can fit it all on one disc. I think that forty one minutes is just a little bit short but I don’t think we can expect to see a Pharaoh album that’s even an hour long. Fifty or fifty five minutes is probably the ideal length for an album. It’s maybe ten minutes short but not thirty minutes short (laughs).

I got Feast or Famine and anyone who wants to email me can, matt@faminesector.com. I eventually stopped asking the final words question in my interviews. It’s funny cos I used to think that this is the most obvious time for anybody to say anything they want but you do this interview and afterwards you don’t have anything left in your brain. Final words? If you don’t have the Spiral Architect disc buy it, if you don’t already have the Mars Volta album buy it, and The Police are the best band that ever existed!