This is the band that wrote "Praise The Lord (Opium Of The Masses)" from Destroy The Opposition or even "Fate Of The Condemned" off the somewhat divisively received War Of Attrition. This is the band that had the gall to have the possibly least commercial name of all time. Even the title track alone from the new LP is 100% grimy and uncompromising (and the LP title screams “classic death metal” like Cause Of Death or Gallery Of Suicide).
I talked with bassist/vocalist Sean Beasley about how this allegedly “Dying” Fetus keeps on like the energizer bunny, despite line up changes and the hostility of the close-minded. We also talked about trying new approaches to recording this time around and many various things death metal.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: You're in Oklahoma City today. Where were you before that?

SEAN BEASLEY: Tuscon, Arizona. We had a little over a 20 hour drive. It was a travel day off yesterday.

MYE: I hope you took turns driving.

SB: Well, we have a driver, but I took the last eight.

MYE: And you gotta play still tonight! You gonna drink some coffee or what?

SB: Naw, we're gonna grill out today, man. There's a big field outside the club and a grill in the back of our trailer. Anytime we're in the middle of nowhere like this we grill out.

MYE: You got the George Foreman?

SB: [laughing] We're not that sophisticated yet. Just some charcoal and a little grill.

MYE: Steaks and zucchinis.

SB: Fire it up.

MYE: With the unorthodox nature of the band name also taken into consideration, in music there is often performance anxiety. In other areas of life too [laughing], for some people. With death metal and tech-metal, and you have so much precision...I have always been impressed by the self-confidence of Dying Fetus, even with different members. For you personally with the last few records and new one, at what age did you get over the fear some people never get past and decide you could do this and that it was your life and appropriate? Like, “I'm gonna just fucking go for it!”

SB: Shit, probably pretty early, actually. Once I started playing shows live, especially if you are into what you are doing and practice a lot, it is pretty easy to get over that. You put all the work in when you are at home. None of us would be doing this if we didn't love it, we'd just be trying to make money. [laughing] If you're doing death metal you gotta love it. It's fun, too. It's not like you're worried about playing. You learn to relish the opportunity to be able to do it, especially if shit is more technical.

MYE: And to show off all the hours you put in learning it!

SB: Oh yeah. And tour is the easy part! You practice by yourself all the time and practice with the band. We pretty much practice every day before we take off on tour a good two weeks solid and then have a day off before we leave. Any other time, we are three days a week. So performing is the easy part, I think.

MYE: Death metal bands seem to complain about touring the least. Some bands get whiny about doing the work, but you guys already spend so much time perfecting your parts. Travelling is just a bit more of the same, more work and second nature.

SB: The band practices in Baltimore, but I live two hours away in Delaware. It's two hours one way for me, so I've got four hours of driving just to practice. Being on the road is almost the break.

MYE: The Ramones would say, “If it is six hours away, do it, and you can still go home.” I'm sick of all these whiny bitches who don't wanna do anything. You guys have really made your mark, and are out to make it last. A lot of younger bands, and not to dis them all 'cuz there are some good ones... I see you are doing some upcoming dates with Trigger The Bloodshed, but...I feel like a lot of people want Korn to come and take them on tour after their first gig.

SB: Some bands haven't earned it as much and start doing this shit and it's a different feeling. You get spoiled completely if your band blows up after the first album or two. You won't have the same experience as we do.

MYE: Yeah, and then everyone wants to blow up that band! [laughing]

SB: [laughing] Right. That's how it works, though. Some guys are cool and know what they are doing. I guess it depends on how spoiled you get. Our last couple of tours we were on buses and it was great. We're back in a van for this tour.

MYE: How's this tour with Hatebreed and Chimaira? I kinda think this is the best Chimaira album, even though it is new. They've done good stuff but the new one is a monster.

SB: Right. It's been a pretty cool tour just for the diversity of the crowd. We always bring in our small slice of the crowd. It depends on if they wanna pay a high ticket price if they don't like the rest of the bands. Everyone is pretty much different from night to night on this tour. One night more hardcore, one more metal, one an Ozzfest crowd. It's kinda weird.

MYE: Everyone in Slipknot shirts.

SB: You could see them at a Three Doors Down concert or this.

MYE: That must be cool, 'cuz you guys get to take the stage and deliver, like, "Check this shit out!"

SB: Yeah. Some people tell us they've never heard of it, and if we were on a death metal bill those people would never have seen us. That's cool.

MYE: There's so many diehards in each genre, hardcore, death metal, whatever. It shows how heavy music can change lives. I watched Machine Head on YouTube from Download 2007. I'd never seen it and they were doing this "Aesthetics Of Hate" song about how after Dimebag got killed, this Conservative site said, "That's what he deserved for playing metal." Such bullshit!

SB: [startled] That's crazy!

MYE: Yeah, it's fuckin' garbage! What you said about the mixture of the crowd on your tour made me think of this. You have your favorite and least favorite bills, some people being more naive, but at least the passion for metal is there.

SB: Yeah, and most people are pretty open to different styles of bands, too. Like, Toxic Holocaust is one of the new, old school style thrash bands. Think Posessed meets Motorhead. Some people have never seen that before live, and we'll play and it can be the same thing. It's definitely opening people's eyes, all in one concert.

MYE: Let's talk Descend Into Depravity. The tracks sound really slow and boring. Just kidding. I mean, wicked fast and evil. Trey (Williams-Drums) sounds excited to be on the record. You can hear it in his playing.

SB: [laughing] Yeah, it's great. He's fired up. All of us had some time apart before we went in. We got all the songs together and had time apart waiting for it. When it actually went down, we were all excited about the production. We did it at Wright Way Studios in Baltimore.

MYE: You've done most of them at Hit and Run.

SB: This time we made a change and Steve Wright produced it also. You never know how it will turn out when you try something new. He had a nice ass studio and knew his shit, too. I was impressed right away. The production came out a lot better. The drums are cleaner and the guitar tone is the best part! He blended it well right off the bat—a couple different style amps. We tried to do things before where John used the same set up except for Stop At Nothing, and we were kind of disappointed in how the guitar turned out on that album.

MYE: It was a different style.

SB: We used a normal rack mount feel instead of the straight head that we used. War Of Attrition we didn't want it to be so thin and maybe it was too loud. This time around we used a couple different style heads. John used his old Ampeg that he uses for all the crunch riffs and we rotated for different parts. Anytime he is up high on the neck we used different amps. It's so well blended you don't notice but you can tell the difference.

MYE: Fuckin' A.

SB: Even the bass. We've tried everything. Direct line with compressors. SansAmp. See what sounds the best. I actually used right out of the cab this time, and I was happy with that.

MYE: I saw some of the in-studio footage and it looked like a killer drum room.

SB: Yeah. He definitely hooked the drums up, too. I was kind of tripping out now and then. He had a piece of foam on every piece of metal that touched each other. [laughing] As soon as we started tracking and especially when the drums were over and we started doing guitars, tracks, bass lines, Steve was so good. Pretty much all the editing was done while we were recording! There's no sampled snare of anything on the drums. Most people do that, especially on blast parts or fast beats. He didn't want any sampled sound messing up the natural sound of the snare. It was up to him with that and it worked out great.

MYE: Yeah, you gotta love it when people have a shitty producer and you'll have the whole kit and suddenly this different sounds flies in for the snare and it is like a fucking high school locker door being slammed! "No, you hardly notice it." [laughing]

SB: And you never know until you get in there and find out who you are working with. Even the guitars, none of the guitars were reamped or anything. It was the natural sound, just the rotating from one head to the other.

MYE: It's ballsy. Everyone is so nervous to do shit these days.

SB: It was more Steve Wright producing it. Everyone is always nervous about changing things 'cuz it might come out better but it might come out like shit. You're always nervous about switching things up in terms of a studio, but it worked right off the bat and we just went with it.

MYE: If it comes out like shit you can always say you went crust punk/lo-fi on purpose and you meant to do that.

SB: Like...Metallica. [laughing]

MYE: Oh no! [laughing] St. Anger had some good riffs but not that snare sound. The new one was way better. Dude, "Your Treachery Will Die With You" was one of my favorite tracks I have heard from you guys in a long time.

SB: Cool.

MYE: The name grabs you but secondly it is musically...holy shit! [laughing] The record art almost reminds me of if Max Payne became a serial killer.

SB: Right. We've heard that one. Sin City. It was just a dark thing with the rain. The whole booklet has the rain and dark shit throughout. It was definitely cool. Relapse came up with it.

MYE: You have a little gore but not so gory, more noir/crime and real, which reminds you of how the band addressed real world stuff later in your career.

SB: Of course we still have political lyrics, but we didn't wanna do the same type of collage album cover. We wanted to make it look different.

MYE: War Of Attrition was awesome because it was about what was going on, but now, a lot of conflict is still happening but things are more about crime, poverty, depression.

SB: It was easy to come up with topics lyric-wise. I wanted to mix it up. "Treachery..." is just like betrayal and revenge. Getting off the politics, but it was fun to do. [laughing] Brutal instead of worrying about what other people will say.

MYE: Everyone remembers the Cro-Mags and how good it feels to have "I'm gonna kill you for being an asshole" songs.

SB: Yeah. [laughing] At Least half the album is still political lyrics. We wanted to mix it up and have some fun with it at the same time. "Treachery..." is actually a song we are already doing live now and that song has been great reaction-wise, pretty much every night. You play new songs and you never know. A lot of people will stare and see what it's about. They don't wanna react to a song that's brand new, but the reaction's been great! They start getting into it instead of staring at us. It's great, especially for a brand new song.

MYE: Off topic a bit, but there's this young fuckin' girl on MySpace who makes these insanely funny but awesome metal tracks. She said she had all your albums. She was like, "You don't have to mention me", but I dig what she is doing and her name is almost as bad as your band. It's just her and she does all these tracks. Insane death metal screams but this tiny ass girl. Her project is called Balls Deep In The Dead!

SB: [laughing] Balls Deep In The Dead! [laughing]

MYE: I was like, "Woah! What is going on here!?" (note: also discovered a punk band named Fisting Mary, as in the Virgin, the other day!) Anyway, she wanted to know what you think about girls in heavy metal and how it is often a boys’ club, especially in death metal.

SB: Well, y'know. There's plenty of chicks playing metal now. I'm always partial to the ones that are more involved with instruments and the scene. Winds Of Plague, we're on tour with them right now, and Kristen (Randall) is playing keyboards. A lot of other bands are more focused on having the image of a chick in the band and it ruins it for the serious girls who are trying to play metal. It's gonna piss some of them off. At the same time that's great, especially if they are good. You have to expand, and more and more of them are gonna do it, but yeah it is better when it is like Winds Of Plague and more about the substance.

MYE: Karyn Crisis was more on the death metal spectrum than a lot of females early on and she'd always get asked how she felt about it and recently blogged that of course some will be good and some will be bad, just like guys. It isn't different just because the gender is. Talent is talent.

SB: True. That's exactly true. I mean, it's definitely hard. Any record company is gonna grab on and use the image. Guys don't have to deal with that shit.

MYE: [laughing] Nobody is like, "Look, we wanna put your saggy, sweaty balls and man junk on the album cover."

SB: [laughing] Guy's don't have to deal with that shit but a lot of chicks do, so...I wish the best for all the ones that are still dealing. More and more will be doing it.

MYE: So there was no long gap between albums this time, man.

SB: Well, between Stop At Nothing and War Of Attrition we didn't have a drummer for a year. That was a really bad time, and we were writing songs on my computer trying to finish up songs. This time around, we switched drummers, of course, but with Trey involved it was pretty much instant. He did a European tour a month after he was in the band! We all live closer together, too. It's not that long distance anymore. I drive two hours but we don't have to fly somebody in across the country. We can just do it now. That is the biggest thing.

MYE: A lot of bands will break up 'cuz they don't have the camaraderie or are far apart. If the music is important to you then you gotta figure it out anyway, but let's face it, there's something to be said for the closeness. It builds camaraderie.

SB: Shit, touring does too.

MYE: You get sick of each other!

SB: Touring does that. I mean, you can be in a band with somebody for a year and if you tour a lot you already know every story they have.

MYE: In a week. Fuck a year! [laughing]

SB: Right. Everything new you experience together. The biggest thing about living near each other is it makes it easy to get stuff done. It's less of a pain in the ass.

MYE: Anything you'd like to say to the fans about how the band feels at this point in your career and to the new fans as well as the people who have been there all along?

SB: This one sounds really natural and came a lot quicker than much of what came before. John still does the majority of the music, so, it's still Fetus for the old fans. For the new fans, we've evolved a little bit but it's still Fetus. We also did videos for "Shepherd's Commandment" and "Your Treachery Will Die With You." We didn't have much time between these tours so we did both in one day. The weekend before we left we did it in New York with Kevin Custer—both in one day. "Shepherd's" is gonna come out first and is the more narrative video. We didn't even see it yet but it was a cool experience. He definitely knew what he was doing. "Treachery" is more of the live video. A lot of close ups and shit like that. We're all dying to see how "Shepherd's" came out. It's like a dude being brainwashed, A Clockwork Orange meets Sin City.

MYE: What was your headspace for your performances on this new record? Anything you wanted to get across?

SB: Well, music-wise keep shit balanced. We might have a song or two that's all blasting or groove riffs or technical. We wanted to balance it better this time. For lyrics, again, we wanted to bounce it around a bit and still keep it the regular Fetus feel in there. I think it's that way. I guess everyone will find out when they listen to it.