CAJA CON DOS CARAS

© 2015 Jackson/Charvel Manufacturing, Inc. Jackson^®, Soloist^™ and the distinctive headstock design commonly found on Jackson guitars are trademarks of JCMI. All rights reserved.

jacksonguitars.com

45 guitarworld.com

bly most [laughs]—records suffer. Espe-cially nowadays, where everybody is so specialized in their thing, and you can almost hear from the sound of a record-ing whether the engineer is a drummer or a bass player or a guitarist, just by how each instrument is handled. Also, I hate to say this in a guitar magazine, but most rock bands focus too much on the guitars, actually. I think what really makes the guitars sound good is how they marry to the bass and drums. And if you can get an organ in there as well? Fantastic.

Moving over to the thematic side of things, you’ve talked about how Opus Eponymous was about the coming of the Antichrist, and Infestissumam was about the presence of the Antichrist.

How about Meliora?

It’s about the absence of god. In many ways, it looks at how people are very detached from the idea of a higher being.

Overall, there is this sort of atheistic way of life today, at least from a bibli-cal point of view. But from a theolog-ical point of view, we have a situation where, you know, when the cat is out of the house the mice dance on the table.

And that is pretty much the backdrop for this album. The lyrics deal with the void that happens when there is no god, when there is no one there to help you.

But even then, there will always be some fucker there to give you guidance. And the band is basically portrayed as the religious party that comes in there with a guiding hand. We offer the one place in the world that is spiritual.

Lyrically, the album almost plays like a film of sorts.

Yes. We have a very cinematic way of thinking. When it comes to writing and recording and putting together our albums, I’ll always make the analogy of comparing the songs to scenes in a film:

This is the last scene; this is the scene where this happens; this is the love scene;

this is the opening scene. So, yes, we’re all very keen movie buffs. And a lot of our pop-culture fascination comes from the cinematic world, too. As does the music—

a lot of the music that inspires us is from movie scores, or comes from songs that we’ve heard in films.

Despite the niche factor of what you do—there’s only so mainstream a band dressed like you guys and singing about the Antichrist can get—you’ve made it clear that you want to be a big band.

We’ve never made a secret of our inten-tion to try to take this as far as we

possi-bly can. I think that any band that claims otherwise is just unable to do it. Most musicians want to become as successful as they possibly can. But I think some-times people confuse the idea. They say, “Oh, you just want to make a lot of money.” Well, yeah. Of course. Who the fuck doesn’t want to be financially independent? But that is not to say that I think making money solves all prob-lems. Or people say, “You just want to be famous.” But I think that the more well known this band becomes, the less of a craving I have to become famous myself. Because to the point where we get to be famous sometimes, I don’t envy other bands that are super-famous all the time. Because that changes every-thing around you. It changes the people around you. Whereas now we can just step out of it. I love that part of it.

You’ve certainly done an impressive job of maintaining your anonymity.

At the same time, musicians tend to want recognition for the things they create. Do you ever find it difficult to just be a “nameless ghoul”?

I wouldn’t say yes. I would say…meh.

There are definitely moments in every-day life where you wish it would have been different. From an image point of view, of course I wish sometimes that I was in a normal band where I could just sit and talk with someone and then go up onstage and be myself and play.

But that is not to say that I do what I do because I want to be recognized. It’s just that sometimes it’s demanding to have to step into a role, let alone deal with all the practicalities that go along with that role.

On the other hand, I think that we actually do get enough recognition, to the point where we feel we have every-thing we could ask for. Like, okay, we’re in a successful band. We live off of our music. We get to play in front of a lot of people. That’s pretty good. And when we are onstage we definitely feel that people give us recognition. So from that exhibitionist point of view, where I want to be recognized so I don’t have to stand in line at a restaurant, it’s not that important. But from a practical point of view you can sometimes envy all the other bands that get to just be them-selves, because that seems very, very, very simple. Whereas we have to come up with a story every time. We have to make shit up, just because we can’t tell everybody the real story. But, at the end of the day, telling that real story will be a lot more fun—I promise you.

NY STEEL

STANDARD

For six years he performed admirably in the much-coveted position as Megadeth’s lead

guitarist—until

he decided

that he had had enough. Now,

CHRIS

BRODERICK takes a bold step forward with Act of Defiance, his musically adventurous

tech-metal project.

LIFE

DETH

after

46

by JON

WIEDERHORN PHOTOS

BY TRAVIS SHINN

No. 9 Sept2015 Vol. 36

48 G U I T A R W O R L D • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5

thing they had played for years.

To complete the lineup, they hired Scar the Martyr vocalist Henry Derek Bonner and ex–Shadows Fall guitar-ist Matt Bachand on bass. Then with the help of Chris “Zeuss” Harris, Act of Defiance assembled Birth and the Burial, a crushing technical metal album that offers more musical diversity than Broderick revealed in Megadeth.

“Thy Lord Belial” is fast and unre-lenting, pausing only for a call-and-response chorus, “Refrain and Refracture” starts with an acous-tic arpeggio over a neo-classical lead and features a melodic rhythm redolent of Killswitch Engage and

“Poison Dream builds from classical piano and strings into an epic multi-faceted thrasher.

“The sound of Act of Defiance is kind of like if you invited every genre of metal together to go to a concert and mosh in a pit, whether it’s old-school thrash to death metal to Scandinavian black metal and everything in between. There are elements of all those types of metal. And I love that about it.”

In a candid, articulate interview, Broderick talks about his years with Megadeth, the rules of being in that band, how he and Drover assembled Act of Defiance, why he hired a guitarist to play bass and the unconventional recording process for Birth and the Burial.