Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with Shai Hulud’s Matt Fox.
As a 14-year-old, Shai Hulud’s Matt Fox remembers spending long hours in a bedroom whose walls often shuddered to the thunder of metal kings Slayer.
“My mother could never understand how during the day I could scream the lyrics of Angel of Death and then at two o’clock in the morning crawl up next to her, having an anxiety attack, terrified I was going to die,” laughs Fox, guitarist with NY metal-hardcore hybrid Shai Hulud.
While Mrs. Fox doesn’t count herself as one of Shai Hulud’s obsessive fans – “she’ll tell you it’s far too angry” – the band certainly has plenty, many of whom are no doubt saddened by the recent decision to wind up the band by the year’s end (Note: This has changed, as the worm has not been slain just yet).
“We’re going to be continuing with another singer and writing music in the same fashion as we always have, just under a different name with a different vocalist,” explains Fox, who began Shai Hulud (pronounced ‘shy halood’) with fellow Floridian guitarist Matt Fletcher in the mid-90s before moving to Poughkeepsie, New York.
In the wake of the group’s third vocalist Geert Van De Velde’s recent departure after four years at the helm, the group recently embarked on a series of farewell tours in the US and Japan on the back of various attic-clearing re-issues, including 2005′s early rarities set A Comprehensive Retrospective.
“I’ll tell you right now, when we first got Geert in the band in 1999, I knew right off the bat – and I think he’ll agree with me – that we were definitely going to be at odds with each other. I can say he’s a very, very decent person, he got a heart of gold, but as with any married couple or band there’s always inner tensions. We kept them together as best we could but we finally got to a point where something just had to give.”
While those inner tensions never truly served to improve Shai Hulud’s creative output, it is with some degree of irony that Fox announces Van De Velde’s participation in the group’s upcoming tours.
“I’m sorry that it couldn’t have worked out with him,” he says, “but it’s good to know that we’re all still on good terms and can do this tour … at least we can close this chapter of our lives, shake hands and know there are no hard feelings.”
Following a brief and final re-grouping, Fox and the remainder of the band will continue on as The Warmth of Red Blood, dropping the long-held Shai Hulud moniker as they search for a new singer, new material and a new beginning.
“We’re writing, we’re demoing, we’re talking to labels, doing all the preliminary band stuff,” says Fox. “The main difference between the bands is the singer. We’ve always had fairly inter-changeable members.”
What won’t change believes Fox, is his penchant for lyrical honesty, a common thread linking much of the back catalogue.
“I write a majority of the lyrics and I write about one of two things,” he says, “things that piss me off or things that move me. Definitely our style of music is aggressive but to compare our music to say, Embrace Today, it’s clear to me that they sound a lot more aggressive than Shai Hulud does. We focus a little bit more on melody and those guys are just a brutal attack.
“Our playing is aggressive by nature and lyrically, most of the songs are fairly aggressive but what I like to think of as having a focused anger with a positive outcome. A blind random rage about something doesn’t do anybody any good. We stem from the hardcore scene and that’s what separates us from your typical metal band, that is to turn a negative into a positive result.”
