Dark Angel are deeply rooted in the early days of thrash metal and over the years formed a cult status that, despite their extended hiatus periods, remains to this day. A few years ago the band reunited for a number of shows and this September the band make their first ever appearance in Australia. One key member of the band has been drummer Gene Hoglan, a man synonymous with some of the most legendary metal albums of all time. His work with such acts as Testament, Death, Strapping Young Lad, Fear Factory and many more are cemented in metal history and his drum performances are downright scary. They don’t call him the Atomic Clock for nothing so it was a real honour to speak to the drum legend himself ahead of the tour to find out what Dark Angel are bringing to the Aussie fans but we also get into his past work with other bands plus news on a brand new Dark Angel record.
Andrew: It’s exciting to see you with Dark Angel in Australia for the first time! I know I’ve seen you before with Fear Factory a number of years ago but Dark Angel is a whole different beast so it’s exciting to see the band back again. How are you guys feeling about it?
Gene: Oh man everybody is so excited and super pumped up for it and stoked! Australia is such a great place to play, everybody is just super excited to be able to make our maiden voyage down to Australia so it’s going to be a night of kick ass Dark Angel metal for everybody. Everybody wants to come out and have a really good time and bang your head and thrash around, it’s going to be awesome so we’re all super pumped up for it.
Andrew: And for many of us it’s going to be our first time seeing Dark Angel live so what are you guys bringing to Australian fans?
Gene: It’s going to be a night of encapsulation of our catalogue, we’re going to be playing songs off every record so that’s pretty cool. We are not just highlighting a single album or anything like that, in our regular set we play about 5 tunes from “Darkness Descends” and a bunch of songs from “Leave Scars” and “Time Does Not Heal” so it’s just going to be cool. Even though the music is really savage and very brutal metal, we tend to have kind of a light hearted approach when we’re on stage and just try to have a good time and hopefully that transcends across to the audience and the audience has a great time too. Our singer Ron (Rineheart) is a big scary looking dude and he likes to have a lot of fun so it’s a good time and hopefully everybody comes out of there enjoying themselves and hopefully be a night to remember for everybody.
Andrew: Definitely so looking forward to it. So with Dark Angel, are you guys back? What’s the story with Dark Angel, are you guys returning again?
Gene: Well we’ve been returning since 2014 and people have asked, ‘Why did you guys come back??’, and it’s just we’ve always remained friends. When Dark Angel kind of dissolved in the early 90’s, it wasn’t due to animosity or anything acrimonious or anything, it was just that, a dissolution. Even when I come through town playing with any of my other bands, the other guys come out and we all hang out and so how it first came to be, the reunion or whatever, in 2013 it started looking like in 2014 I was going to have a bit of time available. So me and my management and stuff chatted back and forth about maybe try give Dark Angel a shot and try to devote some time to it.
There’s always offers through out the years, there’s been offers from festivals and individual promoters and stuff like, ‘Hey if Dark Angel ever gets a chance to come around, we’d love to have you guys’. So it just became a point where we might be able to take some of these offers that have been thrown out over the years, so let’s try to give it a go and see what happens. So it’s all worked out pretty well so far because the band gets to play places like Australia, we get to go do cool things like this and go over to play Japan and play South America and stuff and these are all opportunities that we didn’t have when we were at our hey day so now why not? We got the time and we got the interest in doing it so let’s give it a shot! Everybody has pretty crazy schedules, a lot of these guys are working dudes now so we try to fit in when we can.
Andrew: What’s the response been like while you’ve been on the road so far?
Gene: Oh it’s been awesome. People are like, ‘Dude we never got to see you back in the day’, or it’s been like, ‘I saw you in 1989 and it’s been 30 years since then and now we get to see you again’. So it’s all been great, it’s been super positive and most importantly we’re having a good time doing it. That’s the thing, if you’re going to reunite, you better have some fun at it and take advantage of the fun aspects as opposed to trying to fit that square peg in a round hole. Like say you got 3 members in the band who hate each other and it’s going to be miserable, what’s the point of that! You got 5 guys who all get along well and have a good time together, then hey why not have a good time together and play some shows while doing it so that’s pretty much where that is.
Andrew: So if things go really well for you guys and time pending obviously, would there be a possibility of a new album in the works?
Gene: Absolutely! Jim Durkin (guitars) and myself are working on a new record right now for Dark Angel and the challenges so far have been schedules. I’m a pretty busy guy and when I get back off the road or whatever sessions I am doing and I always make time in getting up to Los Angeles – I live in San Diego which is about a 2 and a half hour drive to Jim Durkin’s place – but we try to get together when we can. We have always worked best at writing when we’re in the same room together, we both have a couple of guitars, we’re throwing riffs at each other and Jim and I recently purchased a little electronic drumkit so now we can just bash out some riffs, Gene track some drums, let’s throw some riffs over the top of that. Now we got it all recorded, the demos are starting to come together and so it’s a pretty exciting time for our little phase of writing that we’re in now so we just got to keep that enthusiasm rolling and keep the metal flowing in all the right directions and make a really kick ass Dark Angel record. So that’s what the hopes are and we’re hoping to get that album out by 2020 and we’re working as hard as we can to make that come to fruition. So keep your eyes open in 2020 and you might see a new Dark Angel record.
Andrew: Awesome! So a question from a lot of fans then is what does a new Dark Angel album sound like, because it has been a long time since we heard new material so what does it feel like at the moment to have some new songs in the works?
Gene: Well I’m super excited because Jim Durkin, for me I know that Dark Angel over the course of the history became my band but I always loved the Jim Durkin era of Dark Angel. Jim wrote all the classic riffs and just the cool vibe that he brought to every song, Jim is a great riff writer and I like to think of myself as no slouch but Jim just has that magic. What’s kind of ironic is Jim’s favorite Dark Angel record is “Time Does Not Heal” and that’s the album that he wasn’t on but he’s always told me, ‘I love Time Does Not Heal, did a great job of that’, so that’s pretty inspiring.
One thing that through out Dark Angel’s history, we put out 4 studio records and none of those albums sounded like the predecessor so it’s kind of challenging to explain the new material in anything other than it sounds like Dark Angel and the thing that I’m trying to capture is the unbridled, youthful enthusiasm of “Darkness Descends”, just that savage – it was a brutal record, it was one of the heaviest records out at the time – and trying to capture that vibe and energy, it’s just evil and whe you listen to it you just want to fucking smash somebody in the face! Awesome, I love that! By the time “Time Does Not Heal” came around, we were kind of entering a little more sedate phase in terms of the sheer brutality of it but the riffs were staying hopefully pretty classy, pretty cool, still thrashy. But that is a different sounding band than “Darkness Descends” so we’re just trying to encapsulate everything, everything that people dug about Dark Angel, we’re trying to throw that into the kitchen sink that is the new material. All that I am hoping for is that we write absolutely destructive, balls crushing, just bury everybody kind of album so I think we can do that.
Andrew: Well we’re excited to hear these new songs when they come out then. I know this might be out of the question at this stage but do you think maybe there will be a new song appearing at one of the shows in Australia at all?
Gene: Well I do know that Jim has expressed that wish and we will see, I’m not sure. I know Jim wants to do that and if we can we would, I’m not sure that we will be able to so I hope nobody expects that but hey, you never know, there could be a surprise. I gotta admit in this modern era of Youtube I’m not sure we will be ready to commit a new song to the possibilities of Youtube out there but I’ll tell you when we get the new album out and we play a few songs off that record, feel free to Youtube it all you want. So we will see what the future of that question entails.
Andrew: Well we definitely look forward to that. I gotta ask some history questions, you’ve been a part of so many great bands and on so many great albums. If I was to name of some of them, Death and Strapping Young Lad and Fear Factory and Testament, outside of Dark Angel has there been a particular album that has really stuck in your mind or really has been what you consider to be one of the highlights of your career?
Gene: Gosh I have a lot of them, I’ve been fortunate in that regard. “City” from Strapping Young Lad, “Alien” too, I love both albums. A lot of the Dethklock records I did, I love those. Both Death records, those are pretty darn cool too. Even some of the projects that I’ve been involved in that haven’t had as major a spotlight or focus on them like one of my earlier bands from Vancouver, Canada was the Almighty Punchdrunk and we have an album called “Music For Them Asses”. You can find it on Youtube, you might have a hard time finding it on say iTunes or Spotify or anything like that but that’s pretty ripping, I love that. There’s also another band, my era of Strapping time up in Vancouver, called Mechanism.
Andrew: Yes!
Gene: You can find our stuff on iTunes and Spotify and all that and our album was called “Inspired Horrific and that’s pretty ball crushing and some of the craziest drumming I’ve ever did. So that’s all pretty cool, I’m fortunate to have a lot of cool memories and a lot of really cool things in the catalogue that I’m so proud of. That’s the thing, the kind of metal I have been involved in is the kind of metal that I like to listen to so that’s pretty cool. It’s like, ‘Gosh I wish our band sounded like this’, ‘Well hey Gene you make our band sound like this’. You make it sound like you listen to and so that’s one thing I’m pretty fortunate in, I don’t look back at a lot of my catalogue with that cringe factor of, ‘Oh god I wish I never recorded this’, I’m like, ‘No I love this!’ I admit I don’t go back and listen to it a lot from like a, ‘Hey let me just check this stuff out’.
I do listen to a lot of my old material..hmm there’s no better way to say it, for inspiration. If I’m going in to do some project or I’m going off to do a killer tour with a whole lot of double bass and crazy drumming on it, I will listen to my stuff that has the crazy double bass or crazy drumming just for inspiration of like, ‘Hey dude you did this once, you can do it again. You can do it on this tour or this new record or whatever’. It’s nice to be able to resort back to your own stuff in that regard like, ‘Hey did this once, I can do it again’. I’m fortunate for having that opportunity to be able to do stuff like that so I’ll take advantage of it absolutely.
Andrew: Yeah it’s fantastic and as I said, the number of bands you’ve been a part of is really an amazing body of work. It’s funny you mention Mechanism because I do actually have that album, I remember buying it when it came out. I loved it, it was a great album so it’s funny you mentioned that!
Gene: Oh cool, thank you!
Andrew: We’ve ran out of time so I better let you go but thanks again for your time, really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you in Australia.
Gene: Yeah absolutely! Before we go, one thing I’d also like to mention about this Dark Angel tour in Australia is that I personally will be sticking around for about a week after the tour and I’m going to be doing some clinics around Australia. One thing about my clinics, and I’ve mentioned this in other interviews, is I always try to make the clinics super entertaining, super engaging and really inclusive of everybody. Yeah I’m a drummer and I’m gonna be playing some drums but you don’t have to be a drummer or even a musician to come down and enjoy them because I tell a lot of stories and it’s kind of a spoken word comedy routine with some drumming going on as well.
So I try to make it really fun for everybody so even if you’re not a musician but say you’ve had questions, I’ve got a big time question-answer policy, shout out you’re questions! I don’t just take 5 minutes to answer a couple of questions and then I’m going back to my rudiments, let’s have some fun. I’ve done Australian clinic tours before and it’s always been awesome, Australia is so much fun and the people down there are so much fun. I like being surrounded by that fun so the more people that come down, the better the clinics are so don’t forget, catch your Gene clinic as well!
DARK ANGEL AUSTRALIA TOUR DATES:
BRISBANE – THE ZOO – WED 25 SEP
SYDNEY – MANNING – THURS 26 SEP
MELBOURNE – MAX WATTS – FRI 27 SEP
ADELAIDE – ENIGMA – SAT 28 SEP
