Suicide Silence – Proud of Inciting A Riot

MTV.com reports: Don’t you just love it when bands regurgitate those same tired, lame lines everyone spews in interviews — you know, ones like, “We wouldn’t be here without the fans,” or “Everything we do, we do with our fans in mind”? Yeah, us too. Those remarks usually come off as disingenuous and halfhearted. But when it comes to Riverside, California, deathcore act SUICIDE SILENCE, actions speak louder than words.

Frontman Mitch Lucker recently recalled a good example: a 2006 gig in Miami that went awry. He remembered gnashing his teeth as he watched the venue’s security team manhandle the mosh-happy crowd. He tried to ignore it — but then one of the band’s female fans took a stagedive. That’s when things got ugly.

“One of the security guards punched her right in the face,” Lucker explained. “They were being complete a–holes, choking people out, throwing people down. So I told everybody in the audience to f— that one security guard up.”

As the sweat-drenched, huddled masses started pushing forward, toward the front of the stage, Lucker said the club’s sentinels began spraying mace — at the band. The singer recalled taking a deep breath just as the tear gas hit him.

“Everybody in this club — which I won’t name — got mad and basically, it incited an entire riot,” he claimed. “The whole show destroyed the venue, somebody stole the PA, a full-on SWAT team was called in, there were news helicopters flying overhead — it was horrible. I guess I kind of instigated it … it was probably one of the craziest things I’ve seen — there was much violence in such a short amount of time.”

Luckily, Lucker and the rest of SUICIDE SILENCE escaped arrest- and bruise-free, albeit covered in lachrymator. But it was a night the band will never forget and hopes to avoid repeating on its current tour with DESPISED ICON, WINDS OF PLAGUE and SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY. The trek concludes Wednesday in Worcester, Massachusetts.

After the run, SUICIDE SILENCE will hit the road with UNEARTH, DARKEST HOUR and AUGUST BURNS RED from Thursday in Towson, Maryland, through October 6 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A headlining tour with WALLS OF JERICHO, A LIFE ONCE LOST and THE AGONY SCENE will follow, but no dates have been booked yet.

According to Lucker, SUICIDE SILENCE would like nothing more than a slot on next summer’s Sounds of the Underground Tour or Ozzfest. He said that all comes down to the reception the band’s Century Media debut, The Cleansing, receives. The disc, produced by John Travis, landed in stores on Tuesday.

“We didn’t want our record to sound like everybody else’s,” Lucker explained. “We worked with John, who’d done stuff with the WU-TANG CLAN and STATIC-X, because he’d never really done a record with a metal band before. That’s what we wanted. We wanted a different feel, a different sound, a different mood to it. But we still wanted to keep it savage and violent — that’s the way it should be.”

The entire record was tracked live, Lucker said, to capture the raw energy the band expends during its live shows. In addition, SUICIDE SILENCE wanted to integrate all the various styles of metal they appreciate into one compact package.

“What we tried to do on this record was to incorporate tons of different styles of metal — death, speed, metalcore — into our songs, because most death-metal bands get labeled ‘death metal,’ and that’s all they ever are,” he said. “They’re confined to just one genre. But we wanted to separate ourselves from that and give each song a different sound, so you can listen to the whole record and not get tired of it. Kids who listen to all genres of metal will find something to like on this record, because we tried to be as open as possible on it.”

While Lucker claims the band pre-sold more than 2,200 copies of The Cleansing through its MySpace page and hopes to attract a lot more fans this year through nonstop touring and, hopefully, that summer-festival slot. And the video the guys recently shot with director Matt Bass (The Esoteric, The Black Dahlia Murder) for “The Price of Beauty” won’t hurt.

“It’s pretty violent,” he said. “Matt wrote the treatment to the song, and it fits so well — the video came out grotesque and intense, just like the song. It’s perfect.”

The clip features the band performing frantically in a dark warehouse, interspersed with footage of a pretty young girl inside a sadistic doctor’s office. “We wanted a girl that looked really innocent, like, ‘I want to get fake boobies and a fake nose’ — the total little generic Orange County chick,” Lucker said. “And she was perfect for it. She let us cut her ears off — she was a good sport.”

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