Cancer Bats are making massive inroads on the metal/hardcore scene with a sound that combines dirty Southern rock, metal and good-time, gang-style hardcore. Set to return to Oz soon with UK deathcore dreamboats Bring Me the Horizon, the easygoing and fun-loving frontman Liam Cormier takes some time out for a chat.
yourGigs (yG): You were last here in '07, what were your thoughts on Australia last time and what can we expect from your performance this time around?
Liam Cormier (LC): We were only there for like three days which is such a ballache, so now we get to come for a lot longer and we get to celebrate huge, which is really, really good!
yG: You guys are pretty good mates with Bring Me the Horizon (BMtH), right?
LC: Yeah we just finished doing Taste of Chaos with those guys for two-and-a-half months.
yG: Do you think you'll get up to much funny business together out here?
LC: We're not a real prank band. Oli [Sykes, BMtH frontman] and I have been planning on going to arcades; we've both realised we have a love of shoot-em-up video games. We like to shoot zombies basically, as much as possible. He told me about some that he did in Melbourne that were cool, so as long as I get to kill some zombies I'll be okay!
yG: In Sydney the arcades have loads of those dancing games.
LC: See I earn my points on the real dance floor, none of that digital bullsh*t! I'll breakdance-battle anyone at the bar!
yG: How do you think you'll you cope with being in the shadow of the dreamboat Oli and all the screaming girls surrounding him?
LC: You mean, like dealing with my own boner? [Laughs].
yG: Haha, yeah how are you going to hide your boner?
LC: I'm definitely gonna have to either side-pipe a lot or I'll tuck it in my waist band. I kinda like the side-pipe 'cause it's moody right? Like you get a boner in the van and you side-pipe it and people are like, "Really dude? You still have a boner!" and you're like, "Nah its side-piped, its cool!"
yG: We sometimes call those "travellers", when you get a boner in the car.
LC: You call them travellers!? See that's what we call beers; like if you're walking the streets with a beer you call those "travellers". Maybe I'll adopt that 'cause I don't drink at all, so I'll use "traveller". I'm glad we're breaking down this barrier. When we come over I'll have my boner vocabulary covered! But yeah, as you said, Oli Sykes is a good-looking man, but he's pretty shy so for him to have people screaming and freaking out, he's pretty polite and nice to the people as they go by; but maybe if we're blasting zombies and we have some screaming b*tches in our faces I'll be like, "Yo, take the travellers outside 'cause I don't wanna deal with this, I just wanna clear this house of dead people!"
yG: So you're starting work on your next album pretty soon, what can we expect from the newer stuff?
LC: We've already started writing four songs actually. Where we were at with Hail Destroyer was where we wanted to be as a band, I think that was our big realisation, that we were that heavy of a band. It's not gonna sound like Hail Destroyer 2 - we definitely want to outdo Hail Destroyer, write a heavier, dirtier album from that. Our other thing too is not just to write the most brutal album that we can just for the sake of it, but to also have tons of melodic stuff and tons of different parts.
yG: On Hail Destroyer you collaborated with a few other artists, like Wade MacNeil of Alexisonfire and Tim McIlrath of Rise Against. Can we expect more collaborations on the new stuff?
LC: Yeah I love having homies be a part of our band, to invite your friends along and get them to sing. I don't have any lyrics written for the new record, to be honest; in those cases it wasn't something we wrote with them in mind, it was like, it would be rad if we could get Tim to sing on it. And we had that one part in 'Deathsmarch' where we were just like, "Wade would sound awesome singing on this song." I still have tons of friends that I wanna have be a part of our record. I wanted to get Matt [Caughtran] from The Bronx for Hail Destroyer but that fell through so I'd love to do something with him. So many dudes I know have f**king rad voices!
yG: Do you ever feel intimidated by their voices at all?
LC: Not anymore, I definitely feel I can hold my own as a singer. When we had George [Pettit, Alexisonfire frontman] on our first record he blew me out of the water singing on 'Pneumonia Hawk'. I was so young at that point and under-developed, I hadn't toured nearly as much as I have now. When it came time to getting him in the studio we were recording our first record and they'd just finished their third, Crisis. He came and just f**king crushed it and I was just like, "Yeah sweet, you just did that in one take, okay." I was like, "I can't sing heavy to save my life", but now it's like "F**k you [George] Pettit, I'll wail!"
yG: You guys are veterans of the van touring circuit, what are some sketchy things that have happened while crammed in the touring van?
LC: We've been pretty lucky; I killed a deer once; that was pretty sketchy. I was driving and that bummed me out super hard and shook me up.
yG: If you could put together a dream tour with some of your favourite bands, who would join you on the road, and why?
LC: Ooh I think it would have to a travelling festival - a "traveller"! We have too many friends, I can't choose! Pretty much all the bands we tour with we end up being best friends. If you look at every band we've ever toured with, that would be my dream tour. One band that we just met that we totally fell in love with is Thursday; we met them on Taste of Chaos and became best friends. I'd love to tour with them again.
yG: You guys use Twitter on tour right?
LC: Yeah I'm a Twitter user but I'm not involved in the Twitter lifestyle in any way. I try and twitt as often as possible, but I've never been to our Twitter website, all I know is I can twitt stupid messages on my phone and send it out into space and then people come up to me and talk about it. But most of the things I twitt about are the music I'm listening to or what I'm drinking, and I only drink coffee; like I had a strong cup of coffee and the only thing I thought to do was tweet about it, that's super pathetic! I have this joke with our merch guy that if I had a camera phone I'd take pictures of my poos. Cos I'll be like, "Whoa I just had this epic poo." You know, it'll be huge, big enough for me to take a photo of. [Laughs].
yG: Finally, I found some people discussing online who would win a fight between you guys and BMtH. Set the record straight, who would actually win?
LC: We're all physically bigger than those guys by a lot, I know those guys are kinda scrappy, but based on physical size, I don't wanna sound cocky, we're not a fighter band, but I will say this: our bass player is one of the toughest dudes ever, he could beat the sh*t out of that entire band. I wouldn't even have to get in the fight 'cause, I don't get in fights, but our bass player, who has been in a ton of fights, would just shred those dudes! I'm a total pussy. Our drummer is like 6'3" and weighs over 200 pounds; I think combined, BMtH weighs 200 pounds [Laughs]. I don't think we'd fight them 'cause we're friends but if it came down to it we might beat them in a fight. [Laughs].
Mike Jeffery
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