Canadian thrash band Annihilator are back with a brand new album “Ballistic, Sadistic” and it’s one we’ve been anticipating, the veterans very rarely let us down and at album number 17, it appears there is no slowing down with what looks to be one of their best yet. We had the privilige of speaking to the main man of Annihilator himself, Jeff Waters to discuss the new tracks as well as get into some of what he has been up to in recent years.
Andrew: So first off before we get into everything, congratulations on the new album! It sounds absolutely killer, you must be very happy with how it turned out.
Jeff: Yeah thanks! It’s one of those things where it’s kind of like you knew as you were doing it, it was either going to really suck or it was going to be really good, it was not going to be a middle [laughs]. It was just good timing for a lot of things and I’ve been trying for years to always try to make a better album and you just can’t, you can try all you want and you’re supposed to try – you’re not supposed to sit back and not give a shit but you try your best and sometimes it all comes together and sometimes it doesn’t.
Andrew: This album when I first heard it kinda sounds like a mixed bag of maybe the best elements of Annihilator. I mean when you went into writing this and coming up with ideas, what was the intention? What did you want to achieve with this album?
Jeff: Some of it was just no intention other than ‘Geez I hope it’s good’, because I did a move to the UK, had a house, sort of a dream house with a section for the band to stay and a rehearsal room and a studio. My top floor was all mine and a nice puppy dog and my friends were close and my family and my son live in the same city and cars and all the good things you work for your whole life and hopefully you get if you’re lucky if you work hard and all this shit and I finally got to a place where, ‘I’m going to retire here, I’m going to die here. Everything is fucking perfect’ and I’m right there and then I met a girl [laughs]. So essentially I moved, she had 2 young kids and I moved all the way to a country I never thought I’d live in which is England and moved to the North East which I definitely didn’t think I would live in. Great to tour here and stuff but it wasn’t my thing and of course Canada is a beautful place so why would I leave anyway but this is what happened and I had a choice of either saying goodbye to her, her moving to Canada with the kids which they are actually thinking, ‘Oh shit we should have taken him up on that one’ [laughs]. But for me I was all in, I was over here building a studio, one hundred percent committed to her and her family, building a studio leaving everything Canadian and selling and giving everything away and starting kind of fresh in a way here giving everything up except my passport and some plane rides back to visit family.
But then all of a sudden a tour got post-poned and our first singer Randy Rampage was going to come on the tour with his band called Rampage and he was going to do the tour supporting us in Europe for a few months and then come up and play some Alice In Hell songs for our 30th anniversary and make it casual and cool. Then he passed away and the British government took my pasport for a while, immigration, so I had to post-pone tours and go through Randy’s stuff. So it was like I did so much thinking I was going to be able to handle everything and hey listen, if you got a couple of bucks and you got great family and wife and a good place to move to and everything was set and good company to build a studio and you got the cash to pay for stuff and all this stuff, it’s a great life and you shouldn’t complain but at the same time I took on about 10 times as much too quick as I should of and the result of that in a nutshell for the album, I ended up with a brand new studio and a lot of new equipment and a totally different way of looking at studio gear and lot of time and design and money and everything spent on it. So I was excited to get in this brand new studio basically that was mine and that was an inspiration, it was an inspiration to be in the Heavy Metal capital country of the world from the 70’s and 80’s. But new marriage, new life, everything but also a lot of stress release and messed up-ness from the last year and a half or 2 years of making this what I thought would be a simple move on me and I could handle anything and everything is good to holy shit I overloaded myself and record companies and lawyers and accountants, both Canadian and British immigration and tax people. All this kind of stuff sort of hits you like, ‘Woah I thought this was supposed to be easy!’
So that all came out on the record in the form of the music, some of the lyrics but basically the music and that for some reason gave a much more aggressive feel to us. We’re not heavy like Cannibal Corpse, Pantera, Slayer, we’re not in that category of heaviness because I’ve tried to be like that years ago. I wanted to be because they are some of my favorite bands but I just never had that in me but this album has absolutely got some of the angriest, pissed off stuff that I can come up with and that was absolutely not intentional. The only intention on this whole record that was planned was not the aggression, it wasn’t any kind of anger or whatever the fuck you want to call it, it was simply write with a drummer this time. Step it up and don’t just record with the software, the tune tracks called Superior Drummer which half the albums you’re listening to are using that is the same as a real drummer is playing on it. I decided to write the album with a drummer, usually I just write it myself and that was a step my band told me I needed to really do to step it up and then I said, ‘What else can I do to step it up?’ They said, ‘Well when you’re jamming with your drummer, Fabio [Alessandrini] from Italy’… I brought him up here for a couple of trips to stay here to lock away in the studio for quite a while and jam these riffs out and being new that when we started writing, he was playing drums like back in the early style of Annihilator and he also knew that’s how I kinda got the old school Annihilator stuff out in the first place, was jamming with the drummer and playing that early style. Ironically the early style of Annihilator’s drummer wasn’t the drummer on the first album, Ray Hartmann, there was two drummers in the band before him and one was me and one was a guy named Paul Malek from Ottawa, Canada back in the demo days. Basically what it was, was kind of a Malcolm Young AC/DC Phil Rudd thing where the guitar player that wrote the songs, Malcolm, could literally sit behind the drum kit and say to Phil Rudd ‘Play this beat’, do you know what I mean? That simple AC/DC beat which is also the hardest beat to play perfect but I would do that with Paul back in the mid-80’s, like ’85 or so and I just kept hitting the drums and play the drums and say hey learn this and he would jump back in and play. He was an amazing guy to take that kind of direction from a guitar player! So basically go back to that early style of drumming and writing with a drummer and then we realized right away when that was happening that we got something going here where we are coming up with old school kind of riffs that Annihilator would do from ’85 to ’93, so let’s just go for it.
Andrew: Yeah that makes complete sense as obviously there is that old school feel in there and I guess Annihilator has always had that over the years as well. But this time it really seemed like you took the bull by the horns and really ran with it.
Jeff: Yeah once the writing was sort of steering towards the earlier days, I knew right then that when I was going to be recording this thing I was going to use all this brand new digital technology to capture the sound as crisp and clear as you can but at the same time the sound that I was going to get for the digital stuff to capture it has to be pure analog old school equipment. So I got to screw around with toys basically, like my second hobby besides Annihilator which, Annihilator is a business but it’s a hobby, my second one is just studio geekness. They used to say computer nerds but I’m more of a studio nerd, is to basically take all this analog gear and try to make the guitars and vocals and bass guitar sort of like that could be used in 1978. So that was a lot of fun and then we kind of brought it back to the older school sound but the clarity is more of a modern sound.
Read review of Ballistic, Sadistic
Andrew: Well it sounds fantastic as I said before. There’s so much stuff to go through in all the songs on there but I do want to mention that because of the fact that you moved to the UK, you had the legendary John Gallagher on backup vocals on one of the tracks there. Did you know him before that or was this something that just sort of came up on the spot?
Jeff: Yeah another thing that was awesome too in another way related to that is that I have a guitar tech in Sheffield so when I go to Sheffield I think Def Leppard and when I go to Birmingham I think of Priest and Sabbath and when I go to Newcastle I think of Brian Johnson, I think of Venom and I think of Raven and fortunately I know a lot of these people from 70,000tons of Metal boat cruise thing I used to do in the all-star jam and all these guys were always in the jam. I was a fan of all these bands anyway so meeting them was amazing and then I found out that the Gallagher brothers from Raven lives in Florida all these years – I knew this years ago – but John flies back to his home in Newcastle at least once a year so I grabbed him when he came back a couple of trips ago and said, ‘Hey would you do me the honour of singing some backups’, and he was totally psyched which was amazing and grabbed a girl here named Kat Gillham from a couple of death metal bands here and I thought if I got John singing high stuff and screaming sometimes in the background and then I just gotta get a death metal singer so it worked out perfectly! Then it worked out great because we kinda came in as a team and I very quickly forgot who was behind the microphone. Even I as a teenager would listen to “When The Going Gets Tough The Tough Get Going” and all this sort of Priest-ish vibe that they had in a certain album and their own sound and another and “All For One”, all that kind of stuff. So I was like a huge fan but as soon as I got in to producer mode and I saw these two standing behind the microphone with their headphones on it was full-on ‘OK guys and girls let’s get all the backing vocals we can do on this record, get both of you doing this’, and we went to work and it was all business and fun and at the end of it I just sat back when it was done that day. It was a whole day and night and besides Kat being really good on this I looked back and was looking at John going, ‘Holy crap I just got John Gallagher to sing the back ups on the whole record’ [laughs].
Andrew: Amazing! I mean when you listen to this record it really does sound like you guys had a lot of fun recording this as well.
Jeff: Oh yeah.
Andrew: It must have been a fantastic time because it really does sound like you went completely all at it, from start to finish you never really let off at all. Not a lot of moments where you kind of took the pedal off the metal so to speak, you kind of just went all the way through.
Jeff: Yeah that’s actually the way it was. It had been so long since I was able to get in the studio and write so many positive and negative things happening too fast that basically when it was time for the record, it was like shaking a coca cola can as much as you could and then you open the damn thing up right. The reason I mention that is because while I’m taking to you I’m also ordering 5 coca cola coffee mugs from Ebay [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs]
Jeff: But the whole record as soon as it started it didn’t stop, it was just non-stop until the end. There was no breaks, it was just go. Near the end I realized that the last phase of recording and mixing, the final stages, the mastering, when I mixed the record, put all the tracks together and put the sound together the way I want, you get the icing on the cake from a mastering engineer. If you’ve done a good job mixing it and I thought I had done a good job, I could of mastered it myself but I thought you know what? This has been too much of an effort to get me to master the record as well, my ears are getting fried and I should get a pro that does a lot of good metal records to finish it off and put that last bit on. So a guy named Maor Appelbaum from LA finished the record off with the mastering and that was it and was like yeah!
Andrew: That’s great and I’ve been seeing that you have been getting a lot of positive response, some people are even saying this is one of the best albums you have ever done as well so that must be very gratifying.
Jeff: I mean I think it’s definitely gotta be in my opinion because I don’t think all my records are great, some I think are classic ones. I’d say the first four in different countries in the world were very big albums, some countries you may have heard of one of those four albums and it was ok and another country it was number two in Japan like King Of The Kill for example. Another country, maybe my home country Canada or in the States nobody had even heard of the record. So I think it’s a return to where the riffs and sounds can be recognised as, ‘Wow sounds a bit like the song “Stonewall”‘ or something or “Set The World On Fire” or “Alice In Hell” and that’s because they probably are, definitely going back there. But I think you can’t beat the originals, you can’t get a second “Back In Black” or a second “Reign In Blood” or a second “Number Of The Beast” or “Screaming For Vengeance” or whatever. So it’s like you try but you just can’t do it.
I think this album to me, totally personally just to me, is my “Death Magnetic” in a way because I’m one of those stereotypical cliched jerks that say, ‘Oh Metallica to me is the first four albums’ right and I say that because some people criticize you for not having an open mind with the Black album and then the song “Fuel” was great and some other stuff, “Load” and “Reload” and all that, but hey it’s just the way their music hit people differently. My favorite was going backwards, my favorite was Justice, my second favorite was “Master Of Puppets” and then “Ride The Lightning” and “Kill ‘Em All” was my fourth favorite. So my take is when “Death Magnetic” came out years ago I heard through the band in I guess interviews that this was a lot of back to the roots kind of vibe and the press were kind of jumping on that so I said ok of course I’m going to buy it, I buy all their CD’s anyway. So I put it in my Camaro, drove around I think I was in Vancouver or Ottawa, I can’t remember and I drove around but I do remember listening to the CD two times in a row so when it finished the first time I just start again and drive, drive, drive and the first thing I do of course is being one of those guys that likes the first four albums the most, is your brain sort of gets on comparison mode for your criticizing – is this as good as this album or this riff. Like I would hear a riff like the “And Justice For All” song and I go, ‘Is this as good as the riff they’re trying to be like”.
At the end of the two listens I realized two facts – One was of course it’s not as good as “And Justice For All” or “Master Of Puppets”. Number two, but holy shit I was banging my head driving for two hours or more, smiling, enjoying every bit of it and it took me right back to the first four albums. So I realized, holy shit if I can actually do that with my music someday, maybe someday bring people back to our first couple of records that a lot of people really like and fuck, I win! I think that’s why “Death Magnetic” was a great record because it brought you back to what they were at the beginning and that’s how I compare this one, it’s never going to be as good as the original but it’s close.
Andrew: Well I personally loved it so congratulations! I know it’s unlikely and you may have mentioned it over the years but it would be fantastic to see you guys down in Australia in the future.
Jeff: Yeah before I get too old right [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs].
Jeff: Definitely! You know what, I’ll tell you honestly, that ain’t up to us. It’s simply promoters will basically give you some pretty shitty offers and you can turn around and go, ‘Well you know, it’s a shitty offer but I really should get down there with the band to play at least once. But I’m kind of like 51 percent no way until I get something that’s not a criminal offer. I hope somebody makes us a reasonable offer, we would love to come down there. I of course have vacationed and worked in Melbourne and it’s one of my favorite cities in the world so I would love to get back even just for the coffee that comes out of that city [laughs].
Andrew: Well we would love to have you and hopefully a promoter out there is listening and checking it out. But in the mean time, thanks for your time, it’s really appreciated. It’s been an absolute privilege talking to you and once again congratulations on “Balistic, Sadistic”.
Jeff: Thanks man, talk to you soon and maybe I’ll see you some day!
