The County Medical Examiners – Continue Gimmick, Interviewed By MTV
The following article was originally posted over at MTV.com:
It’s hard to know just what to make of THE COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINERS.
They’re an American gore-grind trio supposedly comprised of “actual” medical examiners who’re infatuated with extreme-metal legends CARCASS. They use aliases “as they would probably be expelled from the medical profession for playing the sort of music that they do,” according to a recent press release. And their bassist, Dr. Guy Radcliffe, is probably one of the only dudes signed to a metal label who is eligible to collect his Social Security benefits he’s 63 years old.
THE COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINERS have never performed live either, leading to speculation that the band is nothing more than an elaborately conceived gimmick. But guitarist Dr. Morton Fairbanks again, not his real name promises TCME are the real deal.
“I think people are maybe being polite and don’t ask us about it, or they’re just suspending their disbelief, but it’s not terribly important to us what people think,” the good doctor said. “We’re a small band and it’s a small type of music. We don’t want to conquer the world, and even in the realm of gore-grind, our appeal is very limited because we’re doing a very specific niche thing. We were more comfortable not even putting our pictures in the CD, to be honest. … But this kind of attention could damage us in a way, so we have to be kind of careful. It does come across as not true I do understand that. I hear it all the time. But you just have to take it for what it’s worth.”
Fairbanks confirmed that Dr. Radcliffe is, in fact, 63 years old. And according to the guitarist, Radcliffe is the most solid musician in the band.
“He’s classically trained and he also plays upright bass,” he explained. “As far as theory goes, I’m embarrassed to bring him riffs sometimes, because he knows way more theory than I do his background being jazz. He’s by far the best player in the band, and so I feel like we’re a little bit spoiled. Guy was attracted to the project just because of how bizarre it is, and I think it’s novel to him the whole metal thing and the extreme-metal gore-grind-type aspect of it. He had never really been exposed to that before.”
Fairbanks said he hooked up with Radcliffe and drummer Dr. Jack Putnam several years ago while attending various pathology conferences. But despite their mutual interest in pathology, Fairbanks says TCME are just a glorified CARCASS tribute band.
“I started this band because I wanted to emulate CARCASS, who I have a deep affection for,” he said. “I am a bit of an extremist and do miss CARCASS[they split in 1996]. I thought … we would become, in ways, a tribute band but take the actual songs and riffs that [CARCASS] wrote and find ways of recombining them, almost scientifically, to create new songs that sound in the style but aren’t exactly covers. So we’re playing covers of songs [CARCASS] didn’t actually write but could have. The band has a certain appreciation for the fact of how novel it is to completely copy a band but not do cover songs. This is our love letter to this band we miss.”
TCME will release their Relapse Records debut, Olidous Operettas, January 23. The CD which took them more than a year and a half to write and record, since all three bandmembers live in different states will feature eight tracks, including “Morgagnic Anatomics,” “The Virchow Postmortem Procedure” and “Maturating Decompositional Gas.”
Fairbanks described the effort as “somewhere between Symphonies of Sickness and Necroticism-era CARCASS” and “not something you would want to put on before church.” And there’s something else to make the disc even more unique, beyond TCME’s odd approach to making music. “It will be a scented-face CD, which essentially means it will be scratch-’n'-sniff-able,” he said. “Our CD will smell like rotten meat.”
Of course, TCME won’t be touring anytime soon, but Fairbanks says he wouldn’t be opposed to playing a few metal festivals “if I can arrange it and take vacation or something.” And he said he expects to lose a few fans once the album is in stores. “We have always been very underground, so anytime you get something small and very unknown that has a core base of fans and you popularize it in any way, no matter how meager, those fans tend to rebel, simply for the fact that it is now known. I’m sure we’ll lose some fans, and many more potential listeners will just not get it.”
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