Scott from Skinfather interviewing Kyle & Michael from Creatures
Why are Creatures so scary?
It’s just natural man. We just like to write music that sounds really scary. – Kyle
Natural scary vibes that come from the heart. – Michael
Dark and scary things are the coolest. – Kyle
You have a song called “Crush The Tyrants.” What tyrants do you plan on crushing this year? Do you guys have any upcoming plans for tours etc?
Twelve Gauge is the record label that put out Vesuvius. They’re going to be holding a showcase in June. It’s going to be really cool and we are really looking forward to that. – Mike
We are also playing a couple of dates with Power at the end of April and other than that we don’t have any crazy plans. – Kyle
We want to do something at the end of summer. That’s going to be really cool if it happens. – Mike
Nothing set in stone. – Kyle
You guys are the main song writers for both Disgrace and play a major part in writing for Creatures. How do you guys separate writing for Creatures vs. Disgrace? Because they are two very different sounding bands.
For Disgrace, Kyle and I like to think of the craziest things we can do. – Mike
Creatures has a lot more straight forward songwriting and we try to focus on keeping a heavy and scary atmosphere going throughout the song and with Disgrace we try to get as heavy and technical as possible. Creatures isn’t necessarily about being technical, its just about writing good songs. – Kyle
With Creatures its pretty straightforward and structured to keep the vibe going and with Disgrace its more spontaneous and we don’t necessarily know ahead of time where we want to go in writing a song until it happens. – Mike
It’s nice to go back and forth between the two because when your stuck in a rut writing a Creatures song and don’t know what to do next, we take a break and work on a Disgrace song just to do something different and come back to the Creatures song feeling a little more refreshed. Creatures gives you nightmares and Disgrace gives you headaches. – Kyle
Creatures has had a very interesting history. On the demo, you guys covered DYS. You guys put out I, Lucifer and signed to Eulogy, toured a little bit. And now you’re on Vesuvius, which is a very different LP from I, Lucifer. Both LPs are very different from one another. Can you talk about the evolution of Creatures from the demo to where you are now?
I joined the band when Creatures did the split 7″ with Downpresser. I can say from the demo to the self titled 7″, Creatures adopted a more metallic sound. The demo wasn’t very metal sounding and had a more punk pace. I joined the band right before Creatures wrote the songs for the split 7″ with Downpresser on Fineprint Records. When writing the Creatures songs for that split, we basically just wanted to sound like Slayer so thats what we did. The Slayer worship pretty much continued on into writing for the I, Lucifer LP. After that, we did the Salvation 7″, which was pretty much written after we toured ourselves into the ground and couldn’t do it anymore. Madison wrote the music for the two songs on that 7″ by himself and I like them a lot. They were going into a new direction as far as focusing more on the vibe and atmosphere and not so much focusing on shredding and technicality. For Vesuvius, we kinda took that to another level and got simpler with song structures and really focused on just creating a dark atmosphere and vibe. I feel like its a little more mature sounding. – Kyle
Can you tell me about the writing process for Vesuvius?
Madison essentially wrote half of the record a long time ago when we first started touring for I, Lucifer. The songs he wrote were slower and simpler and we wanted to write the rest of the record in the vein of those songs and it took us forever to do it. Over time, after Michael and myself wrote a few songs for the record, all of us kept rearranging parts and adding little details to all of the songs until all of us were happy. The order of the songs on the record was very important to us because we felt like if a song was going to be on the record, it needed to be part of a cohesive listening experience that made the record what it is. We communicated a lot about the record. We probably spent more time talking about Vesuvius than we did actually writing it. In the last couple months before we recorded the record is when we really hammered out all of the details as far as how every song was going to flow into each other. Instead of having a record that is song after song, we wanted to make it a good listening experience throughout the record. – Kyle
So far, since the record has come out, there hasn’t been a show where we haven’t played Vesuvius as a whole. – Mike
Can you tell me about the point in time in 2009 when Creatures was touring for I, Lucifer as well as the 5 week stint in Denver, CO?
When I, Lucifer was coming out, all five of us that were in the band at that point in time just wanted to tour and do the most with the record that we could. Eulogy Recordings was putting it out and we were all excited about the distribution and how many people the record was potentially reaching. We just kinda toured a lot more than we should have. We weren’t paying each other per diems or anything and were just living off of the little personal money that we had left which is hard to do when you are touring instead of working. The van we were using continually had problems and all of any kind of money we were making basically went to repairs. When we played This Is Hardcore that year, we had a new transmission built for the van at the Philadelphia AAMCO. Less than 2 months later and within the 10,000 or 12,000 mile warranty or whatever it was, the transmission took a shit on us again in the middle of our tour with Rise and Fall in Denver. Since we were still under warranty, we had the van taken to the AAMCO in Denver. In order for the Denver AAMCO location to work on the van under warranty, they needed the approval and cooperation from the Philadelphia location. Between the Denver AAMCO, the Philadelphia AAMCO, and the AAMCO headquarters, they all kept giving us the run around for a whole month which is why we stayed there for a whole month. I am very thankful for how much everyone helped us out with giving us places to stay. – Kyle
A little birdie told me that Creatures is writing new stuff and it is in an interesting tuning.
It’s in a lower experimental-ish tuning. All i can say is that it is dark, interesting, experimental…and it doesn’t sound like Vesuvius at all. – Kyle
The internet asks, “why don’t you play old songs?”
We don’t really play any songs from before I, Lucifer mainly because we feel like we are passed those songs and they don’t serve as any sort of excitement for us. We play what we want to play live and we don’t want to play those songs. The older songs don’t really portray what we try to go for live now. Imagine us playing Vesuvius songs and I, Lucifer songs and then playing “Holocaust” from the demo…it just wouldn’t sound right. We try to make our live sets flow as cohesively as possible nowadays and playing older songs just wouldn’t work. – Kyle
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