Monday, September 18, 2017

INTERVIEW TO LUBRICANT!!! (SAMI VIITASAARI)

With the "Swallow This" compilation, released some months ago by Svart Records I discovered a band very worthy with its imaginative death'n'roll but, unfortunately, it had a too short life to express completely its potential. But fortunately, as many Finnish death metal bands of the "golden years" (Abhorrence, Purtenance...), also the death'n'rollers Lubricant are back and I hope that they will release finally an entire full-lenght album because they deserve it after all their efforts! So, I present to you a very nice interview to Lubricant through the words of their guitarist Sami Viitasaari!


Hail Sami, how you doing? Well, let’s start this interview talking about your very early days. In this purpose, you were born in 1988 as O.V.D. but you changed your moniker in 1990. So, what were the reasons that pushed you to call yourself as Lubricant?

Well, O.V.D. was actually a speed metal band and when our musical taste developed more in a heavier direction towards death metal, we decided to change the name to Lubricant. We thought that name was good, because it is not a very typical name of a death metal band.

The cover artwork of “Swallow This”, that’s very strange for every death metal band, is a better version of the one that you used for the “Nookleptia” EP. But do you want to explain exactly the meaning of a cover artwork of this kind?

We love them both, because they are also very original and kind of unique artworks. It is also nice that artwork doesn`t represent our music style too much. Just imagine to buy this record only because of the cover artwork and get a real surprise to finally listening it!

Exhuming a band after many years with its entire original line-up isn’t an everyday event. What was possible this and why did you reform the band in 2015?

We were contacted by Immu (drummer of Slugathor), because he was an organizer of Finnish death metal maniacs – festival (Pori, 2015). He asked that could it be possible to make the Lubricant's come-back for this event. We had a little Fb-messenger-chat together with all Lubricant members and after a small moment we decided to make it happen! Then we just organized some rehearsal sessions and drink couple of beers together. I need to say that the moment was very magical, because some of the guys haven`t seen each others in over 20 years!

What were the recordings of “Swallow the Symmetric Swab” and “Nookleptia” and why was the latter one so different from the “Swallow…” demo? In 1993 you seemed to be influenced very much by bands like Entombed, that released their fundamental death’n’roll masterpiece just during that year.

I think that it was a natural evolution of our personal taste of music that was driving Lubricant`s music slowly to more rock-influenced direction. We have always listened quite a different bands and music styles.

Surely, the particular lyrical themes of Lubricant were a distinctive feature of yours. But what did you want to express through absurd medical terms and gore deformities à la early Carcass and what were your lyrical influences? Do you want to describe songs as “Laceration of Vasoconstrictive Emotion”?

We were using English/Latin medical dictionary to create those lyrics. At the beginning it was mainly a funny thing, but later on it turned out to be more serious way to do them. If you take first letters of the song called "Laceration of Vasoconstrictive Emotion" you can find the word "LOVE". That particular song is about siamese twins and, if I remember right, it is telling the real love story between two fetuses and how they are finally growing together, etc.

I know that your label Morbid Records released in 1993 a curious split EP with you and other 3 bands that was dedicated to a certain Zander, a young guy beaten to death by some Nazis. But who was he?

Zander was a super nice guy who was a good friend of Morbid Records guys. He was actually driving the car, when we were doing a mini-tour in Germany after releasing "Nookleptia" ep. May him rest in piece.

Why did you cease your activities as Lubricant in 1994? At time were you writing new stuff then unreleased?

There was several things happening at the same time which affected. Few of us were moving to other towns because of studies, etc. It was kind of hard to maintain with Lubricant at that moment. There were most propably some riffs coming up, but not really any unreleased stuff.

Did you do after the end of Lubricant in 1994. I ask this also because, according to Metal-Archives, it looks that no one of you played in other metal bands after Lubricant, and is it correct?

Yes, that’s true. Aksu (drums) and Panda (vocals) had some band things happening later, but they were mainly other types of music than metal.

As I noted into the review, many Finnish bands of the “golden years” of death metal were never able to realize their long-held debut album, and some of them were very important as Abhorrence, Cartilage and, surely, you. In your opinion, what are the reasons behind all this? Are there some forgotten death metal bands of your country that you would like to mention here?

I can only say about Lubricant, because I don`t know the story behind those other bands. In our case it was hard to maintain band, because guys kind of split a little bit around the Finland, because of the studies, as I said before. I wouldn`t say that there are some forgotten Finnish death metal bands, you can find a lot of stuff nowadays from Youtube & Google. Overall I think that Finnish old school death metal is really a well known thing in the world.

In a country full of emerging death metal bands as Finland was during the ‘90s, was it easy to play live gigs? What was the best gig you had that you remember?

There was quite a lot of gigs happening in Finland during 90`s, but not in every month. I can`t say which gig has been the best, but it was definitely nice to have a chance to play few gigs in Sweden & Germany, also.

Now are you writing new songs? Will they be in the same death’n’roll style of the “Nookleptia” EP?

We already have 3-4 new songs and we have included two of those to our gigset already. Style is 100% Lubricant, so it has influences from death metal, grindgore, punk and of course some rock-influences, as well.

Ok guys, the questions of this interview are ended. Now you have the right to end definitely it as you want and thank you very much for replying to the many questions of mine!

Greetings from Finland to all metalheads around! Thanks for the interview and let`s hope that we will have a chance to play in Italy someday.

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/lubricantband/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2cDouh82pZBLNYZkACN8qG

Thanks to Sami for sending me some amazing live pictures about the live come-back of his band during the 2015 Pori Festival mentioned into the interview!

If you want, make a donation to Timpani allo Spiedo 'zine through the PayPal button at your right, above the cover artwork of my upcoming book about the proto-black metal. Thank you very much!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment