These days, it’s hard enough to make a name for yourself in one band. To be revered in two genre-defining bands (allegedly three, depending on who you ask)? Near impossible. And yet that’s exactly what Ross Sewage has done, handling bass and gurgles for both Exhumed and Impaled. On this late evening Zoom call, Sewage and I find ourselves discussing the latter act, who have just released an incredible retrospective entitled Demo Medicale. In this brand new interview, Sewage reflects upon these newfound “lost” demos, the making of Impaled’s sophomore masterpiece, Mondo Medicale, getting out of a bad record deal, and the possibility of a new Impaled album.
Greetings Ross and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing tonight?
Ross Sewage: What’s up fucking dorks and nerds who care about Impaled? I’m good! How are you doing?
I’m doing great! I’m a dork and nerd who cares about Impaled, so I think this is gonna be a great conversation! Thank you for taking the time to do this interview.
RS: We’re gonna have a good dorky, nerdy talk. I feel like I’ve become godfather of the dorks now, so it’s great!
Impaled have just released Demo Medicale: A recording featuring demo versions of songs that would go onto be featured on the band’s second album, Mondo Medicale. Can you give us some background on how the band got a hold of these recordings, and what events led up to their release?
RS: Well, let’s start at the beginning. Mondo Medicale came out and we had a bad relationship with the label, and Mondo Medicale disappeared from print entirely forever. The band continued. We had a record on Century Media. We had a couple records on Willowtip. We kind of went into I’d say a semi-retirement where people had other projects to work on and stuff. We never broke up. We just would play shows once in a while and have some fun. (Guitarist/vocalist) Leon (del Muerte) had rejoined and we became a five piece in the interim.
Fast forward to sometime in 2022, (guitarist/vocalist) Sean (“Bloodbath” McGrath) gets a text from our former guitar player, Andrew LaBarre, who had been on Mondo Medicale and the Medical Waste EP. He had done a tour with us and left the band. It wasn’t under the greatest terms, but basically, he didn’t enjoy touring a whole lot. It didn’t end up being what he wanted out of it. We were like, “We want to do things.” (Drummer) Raúl (Varela) maintained a good relationship with him and had another musical project after that. I had seen him occasionally. I ran into him bike riding one day like, “Hey, how’s it going?”
In 2022, we heard that he’d been unwell. He had gotten diagnosed with ALS. Nobody had really seen him from our camp. Out of the blue, one day, Sean gets a text. It says, “Hey, do you guys have a copy of the demo that we did for Mondo Medicale?” Sean’s like, “No, do you?” He goes, “Yeah, I have it. If you’d like it, you should come by and grab it.” So Sean went and was like, “Oh, cool! Alright, cool little piece. Who knows what it sounds like?” He was like, “Do you remember recording demos?” I was like, “No, I don’t know. I don’t remember.” I was on lots of drugs and drinking too much probably at the time *laughs*.
He stops at his house and he meets Andrew’s wife. She’s like, “Andrew’s not feeling well, but here’s the CD-R.” Sean gets it and listens to it and he’s like, “Holy shit, this is actually pretty decent!” This is not quite a demo. It’s actually mixed. We had all the parts there. It was really well recorded by Andrew, just working with this 8-track mini-disc recorder back in the day, just working with that and running shit through pedals, looping stuff, and ended up with this really full sounding “demo”. Sean played it for me and I was like, “This is really good. Frankly, we can’t put out Mondo Medicale legally, but maybe we can put this out.”
The sad part of the story is Andrew was wrapping up things with his life. His illness had taken a really bad turn and he passed away a few months later, which was kind of insane. We were like, “Woah, OK. Now we sort of have to release this because that’s crazy.” Andrew was integral to the making of Mondo Medicale. From the get-go, his writing was phenomenal. His vocals were killer. It didn’t work out in the band because of what we wanted to do with touring and stuff like that, but creatively, we couldn’t have asked for someone better to jump in to fill Leon’s shoes.
He fit in great. He knew exactly where we wanted to go with the direction of the band and brought such good material and vibes to the recording process. I give him most of the credit. The rest of us were a little sloppy and messy, and he kind of held us together, and help us put together a record that I’m still very proud of. We got the record and we kind of sat on it for a couple years, thinking about how to put it out, if we really wanted to, and thinking about what do we do with the art? Do we just put this out with a blank piece of white paper?
I also still have all the artwork I did, the photos I took from Mondo Medicale, different versions. I was going through old photos, outtakes of us. I was like, “I think we can put something fun together.” Because Mondo Medicale can’t be out there, it will still have that spirit where you kind of own it *laughs*, even though it’s not the actual record, but it still has a little rough look around the edges and isn’t just retreading old ground. It’s its own thing as well.
I’d like to go back in time, if I may, and set the stage. The year is 2001 and Impaled have just released the Choice Cuts compilation. Where is Impaled at as a band as this point, and when do ideas start coming together for Mondo Medicale?
RS: Where Impaled is as a band was very contentious because Leon and the rest of us weren’t getting along very well. It was clear he wanted to do some other shit, but even while that was going on, Mondo Medicale was supposed to be Death After Life, if that makes sense. It was originally conceived as a concept record. I had this story in mind about the doctors trying to bring corpses back to life and failing, because that’s a ridiculous thing to do. That had already come in. We were already coming up with titles.
Leon’s band after Impaled was Murder Construct. That was actually one of his working titles he was thinking of for the Death After Life concept. That’s how old that concept was before we finally got to it. What happened was, then we started not only having a contentious relationship with Leon, which we ended and then Andrew was brought into the band, because Sean had worked with him recording and he was just a good guy to work with. His band, that had just kind of floundered, was actually writing some killer material, this old band called Prevail. We really liked Andrew’s writing style.
Then, we were like, “OK, we have this concept record, but maybe let’s save the idea because we need to get out of this contract with Necropolis because this sucks.” *laughs* It was really bad. Necropolis was a label teetering on the edge, so we renegotiated. We were like, “OK, we have one more record with them.”, and we already had most of the songs written. We were like, “We’re gonna shelf the concept record idea, but we still want this to be supercharged medical themed. Let’s distill what Carcass did, but we’re gonna really do it up. We’re gonna start wearing aprons onstage that are covered in blood. We’re gonna take all these doctor photos.”
General Surgery would’ve been another example of that, although they hadn’t taken it to that extreme when they put out the Necrology EP. They had just took band photos. We were like, “What if that concept went further theatrically, to where this band is a band of hedonist doctors?” Kind of crossing the line from being a band like Carcass, to skirting around being a band like GWAR. GWAR was an influence on Mondo Medicale, at least in my thinking. The first song (“Dead Inside”) is about four guys who go out and poison the world.
There’s other songs. “Raise the Stakes” was inspired by “The Song of Words” by GWAR. We’re just kind of talking about how we’re badasses and we’re gonna hurt people *laughs*. It’s not a concept record. It’s a conceptual record, where I was keeping those things in mind. We were writing the lyrics from the point of view of these evil doctors. It had been in the works for a while, to do that. We just didn’t make it a story record. We decided to try and save that for our “big label” debut when we hit Century Media.
What was the band’s songwriting process like for Mondo Medicale? In other words, who handled what aspects of the writing, and in any ways did the process differ from past Impaled releases?
RS: Yeah, it definitely differed because when The Dead Shall Dead Remain was written, that was largely…Leon or Sean would have an idea. They had quite a few of these ideas before even I joined the band. They had already started working on a few of the songs, but they also lived in the same building together and hung out and drank 40s together all the time. They’d be like, “Yo, I got the ideas of a song.” The other guy would be like, “Hey, this would be a good bridge riff.” They had a very collaborative relationship on that record, even though one song is definitely more Leon, one song is definitely more Sean. There was a lot of back and forth between the two.
When I joined the band, the song I brought to the record was just a song I had already written. I was like, “Hey, would this fit?” They were like, “Yeah, sure that fits. Let’s just do that.” There was more of a collaboration between Sean and Leon on the first record. By the time Mondo Medicale came out, everybody was kind of like, instead of having to figure out what the band sounded like, we kind of all knew. We would bring songs to the table and the band would still collaborate. We’d still learn them.
Even when you listen to Demo Medicale, you can hear a few song changes, like a few riff changes. We recorded it and then we were like, “Hey, actually, what if we change the riff a little bit to something like this?” “OK, cool. That sounds great. Let’s go with it.” It was still collaborative, but I think the ideas came from each member much more fermented and ready to be in the band, as opposed to we’re writing this in the rehearsal studio. It was like, “No, there’s a full song written. Now we’re just polishing the edges.”
When listening to Demo Medicale, which songs do you feel received the biggest revamps come the recording of the album proper?
RS: I think that it would be my song *laughs*, one of the songs I wrote, because I am not the musician that Sean or Andrew is. I understand song structure, maybe a catchy chorus, but when it comes to the fiddly-fiddlies and the diddly-diddlies, they’re definitely eons beyond what I’ll ever be, still to this day. Definitely “We Belong Dead” got the most changes, I would say. It’s not even like the structure changed all that much. If you put them back to back, you’d be like, “They’re still the same song.” But it’s like, “Oh, OK. This riff is a little bit better now.” It just got a little flourish put on it.
I want to ask you about the vocals, which on this album, are shared by yourself, Sean, and Andrew. How did the band go about deciding who handled which lines of the songs?
SM: Originally, I was not gonna even do vocals for Impaled when I joined because I was in Exhumed and Impaled concurrently for a few months, and I tried to keep them separate in their own way. Once I was kicked out of Exhumed, I was like, “OK, I can do some vocals.” The first record, I have a few on one song, but it was mostly pitch shifter. Live, pitch shifters in the year 2000 were unreliable. You had to have a rack mount and all this bullshit. We just decided, “Fine, I’ll just take the pitch shifter parts because I kind of have a more pig grunt gurgly sound.”
When we started getting into the EP writing for Impaled, the EP after that with Leon still in the band, we ditched the pitch shifter entirely. I was like, “I’ll just take the low lows.” By the time Andrew came in, Andrew had this great midrange very David Vincent octave level growl. I love his vocals on that record. I love that kind of midrange growl. It’s not what I really do. We just decided to try to put things, to try to have all three of us, because we thought, “Hey, Carcass had two vocalists. We can have three vocalists. Fuck them” *laughs* I’m just kidding
Andrew was so good. We could really have these parts, and it was really powerful live to have three people on the mic. As far as who would take what, it was always going to be mostly Sean in the lead because we’re writing all these insanely verbose medical lyrics. We were like, “The guy you understand the most should probably be singing most of them.” You can’t understand a damn thing out of my mouth. Andrew was a midrange. Sean was gonna be like 60%, I’m gonna be 35%, and the rest we’ll give to Andrew, the new guy, but pepper it well. In terms of deciding who was gonna sing what in the songs, I would always decide, “What’s the hardest riff to play? I’m gonna write that part for Sean, not myself, and torture him a little bit.” *laughs*
So it was all strategy!
RS: Yeah, it’s definitely strategy. I want to look good headbanging. I don’t need to take those complicated parts. Fuck that.
Perhaps as infamous as the music on Mondo Medicale is the album cover itself. Who came up for the idea for the cover, and was the album actually ever banned from any countries because of it?
RS: Fuck no, it wasn’t banned from any countries! Come on! *laughs* It was never banned from any countries. I can’t remember if it was me or Sean who came up with that idea of just a tortured face. You know that kind of Autopsy style artwork. I was like, “Let’s keep it photoreal.” The Carcass photo collages are so intense and cool, right? It’s like, “Let’s not collage it. Let’s create a horror scene.” Me and Sean love horror movies. Even at that time, we had started building rubber skulls to put on the mics, custom that we were sculpting and stuff like that. We’d have our special effects stuff that we liked to do. We were like, “Let’s keep it photoreal, keep it gross, but horror movie style.”
I think it was my idea, but I don’t want to put that down for sure. There was a lot of collaboration going on. There was a lot of late nights of me and Sean drinking 40s, doing drugs, being stupid idiots, and coming up with ideas. It’s hard to say who really came up with that one, but I put it together in my living room. There’s a saw in the guy’s head that I had to chop up to make it look like it was in his head. I put together this fake eyeball. I’m taking the photo, but it’s Andrew’s, Sean’s, and Raúl’s actual hands in the photo holding the surgical implements that are torturing this friend of ours who, for payment, he got a burrito. That was it. We gave him a burrito *laughs*. Always negotiate your contract, kids! We just wanted to make it gross and gnarly.
The banning, let’s be real, 23 years later. It was not actually banned in any countries, but I think they had to move the CD pressing plant because the one CD presser that Necropolis had been working with refused to print it. Wait a second…wait, no. This is all lies. I’m totally lying. I’m sorry, I’m remembering in real time. It was never banned in any countries. I think we did that on the first record. We said “Banned in 42 countries” because we did get some pushback on that album cover from reviewers and stuff. They were like, “This is disgusting and gross.” So we were like, “Fuck it, banned in 42 countries.”
Then, we decided to double that number on Mondo Medicale. It was the Choice Cuts EP which, I don’t know if you remember, is a baby being born onto a vegetable platter with a hacksaw at its neck. That one actually caused us problems. We worked up to actually getting into problems. That one pissed off some magazines and reviewers. That is the one where they had to move the CD pressing plant and find somebody who was willing to do it. The truth comes out finally!
When you hear those old stories though about those Cannibal albums and Autopsy’s Acts of the Unspeakable, can you blame me for asking?
RS: Oh yeah, but we weren’t as big as those bands! I mean, I’m sure if you tried to release us in Dubai or the United Arab Emirates, they would say no. Let’s just go ahead and say we’re banned there de facto. There’s no way you’re gonna get our album in the UAE. There’s not a chance.
Sorry UAE death metallists. It ain’t gonna happen!
RS: Exactly.
Mondo Medicale produced two music videos in “Operating Theatre” and “Choke on It”. What memories stnad out to you from the making of those videos?
RS: “Operating Theatre”, Sean was taking video classes at school and this was his final project, so what I remember was we were gonna get a video made for free, basically. Sean has to do this for his homework. It was in our jam spot, where we recorded it. It was absolutely disgusting because in our rehearsal studio, it was carpeted. We set up the scrims. We tried to make it look like a surgery scene and we had the guy who was on our cover. He came back for another burrito. He’s in the video.
We came up with some dumb gore gag effects. I had this idea that we’d just be spilling blood from our mouths while singing, but obviously we’re not gonna us real blood because that’s unsanitary. Our sanitary choice was to use dairy creamer mixed with food dye, so we’re just filling out lactose filled cream from a cow out of our mouths, spilling it out like it’s supposed to be blood. We tried to mask everything. It goes all over the carpet and our rehearsal room spelled like rotten milk for maybe the next three years that we were in there. It was gnarly and disgusting. Luckily, the place was a shithole, so we didn’t lose any deposit because it was already a garbage place anyway.
“Choke on It”, Raúl decided he was gonna take video classes. He was like, “I wanna do the video.” We were like, “Great.” So we show up. We thought he had all these plans in mind and he was like, “So what do you guys wanna do?” We were like, “Are you fucking kidding us? You don’t have anything in mind?” Literally day of we made up that video as we went along. It’s a little rough shot, but he had a basement. We were like, “OK, we’ll play in the basement. Let’s set up some lights with chains. OK, let’s just all die in the video by different ways of choking.” Literally throughout the weekend, we were just coming up with dumb gags to kill ourselves in the video because Raúl forgot to think of a concept to start with. But we made due! It’s what Impaled was always good at doing. Shitty venue? We’re gonna make due. Shitty recording place? We’re gonna make due. We’re gonna get through it as a team.
Funny enough, the “Operating Theatre” video was my introduction to Impaled. I wanna say I was 12 and on a forum thread about the “Craziest Metal Videos”. Of course, every other comment was a Marilyn Manson video, but I had seen all those already. Then, someone commented that Deicide video where the priest gets killed (“Homage for Satan”) and I was like, “OK, that’s kind of crazy.” Then, I saw “Operating Theatre” and I was like, “Woah! Now THAT’S crazy!” And here we are 14 years later!
RS: Yeah, here we are and you saw something that looked as rough as a real snuff video at 12 *laughs*. It’s a really rough around the edges video, but it is fun to watch I think.
It’s no secret that one of Impaled’s biggest influences is Carcass. Which album do you prefer: Reek of Putrefaction or Symphonies of Sickness, and why?
RS: Symphonies of Sickness. Reek of Putrefaction is a great grindcore record, but Symphonies of Sickness is where they started hitting their stride. Bill (Steer) let his guitar play more and was really letting his Iron Maiden influence in. I love brutal death metal. I love it raw as fuck, but I still also love melody. I want to have something that makes me want to tap my toes and headbang. That’s where they really, really came into their own, and even as a band with their own unique sound.
Reek of Putrefaction is a great grind record, but it’s not so dissimilar from some other things that came out around the time, or even from Bill’s work in Napalm Death. It’s a little fuller, but Symphonies of Sickness is where it’s like, “This is a totally different band than Napalm Death.” They’ve got their own thing going on. It’s a remarkable groundbreaking thing that they did, as cataloged by their influence on so many damn bands.
It’s been 18 years since Impaled’s last original full length, The Last Gasp. Could you see the band ever making a new album again, or are you content with the music that Impaled created and continuing as a live act?
RS: Oh God. I’m gonna answer that with a yes and a yes. Things can happen. There’s been talk and stuff, but if it didn’t, I’m supper happy with what we’ve been able to do.
The new Impaled demo, Demo Medicale, is available now on Tankcrimes. For more information on Impaled, click here.
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