Nail Within in "Spiderhouse"
Studio
Studio Report By Yishai
For an Israeli metal band to record a debut album in 30 days outside
the country is pretty close to making a dream come true, the domestic
metal scene is tough, hardly without any media support from any kind and
only pushed by the metal labels, local distributors and by the bands
themselves.
We decided to go all the way to Germany to "Spiderhouse
Studio" to work with a legendary producer whom created some of the
most influential thrash metal albums as "Pleasure To Kill",
"Persecution Mania", "Agent Orange" and
"Dimension Hatros" and worked among other with acts as
Helloween, Pestilence, Celtic Frost etc. This person's name is Harris
Johns.
The studio's located in a small, old fashioned village in the eastern
part of Germany, close to nowhere more or less... we came there with
Zeev Tananboim from the Israeli legend SALEM, he is a close friend and
worked with us since the early days. He came to co-produce the album
together with Harris, joined by Salem’s ultra killer drummer Nir Nakav
on the drums. We were 6 crazy Israeli metal-hearts flying to record a
debut album and making our dream come true.
The studio is a big ancient house, in the first floor there is the
studio and at the second one we lived, 4 living rooms, 1 shower + toilet
and a lot of beer/smoke and metal records lying everywhere... it's a
pretty inspiring place (the village) but We have to admit that after a
few days we became bored by the area and the trains to Berlin became
more and more wanted.
We rented the drum set for 5 days but Nir is a killing machine so it
only took him 2 days.
Evil Haim recorded his bass parts pretty fast as well, using more
distortion effects on the bass in order to sound more heavy &
massive (which he definitely sounded at the end!!). Step by step we
developed within the process. We started to record guitars - both guitar
players Alex and Matan used Mesa Boogie Rectifier amps with some work on
Marshall amps as well, so the sound was a combination of old school and
updated, thrashy but heavy and razored. We started to see the vision of
the final result and it was (as we said) thrashy but heavy as hell!
L-R: Thomas, Yishai, Mille
Two days after we started with the vocals, two very important guests
came to the studio. In fact, they were 3, but we never expected the
third one to appear. In fact, we didn't know who he was in the
beginning. Mille Petrozza from the thrash gods KREATOR and Tomas
Lindberg (At The Gates, Lock Up, The Great Deceiver) came to sing as
guest vocalists on the track "Dirty Colored Knife". Tomas is a
good friend, Yishai’s ex-band played with him in Israel 3 years ago
and we hung out together for a week, it was an unforgettable experience
as we made a huge show over here. For him it was great to meet Mille as
well as they got along very well when they met before, so everybody was
expecting to meet each other. They both, of course, did a GREAT job. For
us, as people who grew up on Kreator albums it was a great experience
and a huge respect that someone like Mille came to sing with us. It made
us really proud especially regarding the fact that we came from Israel
and are totally unknown to the scene.
It was great to meet Tomas again, he came with all his family and
stayed for 5 days with us as a great vacation for us all, we drank,
played, recorded, cooked dinners for each other, it was great.
Mille (left) and Thomas (right)
Together
with Mille came a friend of his by the name of Robert Gonella. We didn't
know who he is but we smoked, drank and talked pretty well. During one
of our conversations he told us: "well, I was a singer too, 14
years ago in a thrash metal band" being big fans of 80's thrash
metal we all asked together "who?" and he said "you'll
never know", that made us even more excited "who?" we
asked again, "ASSASSIN" he answered. He was VERY surprised to
hear about Israeli metal heads knowing his band. Since we all really
worship their 2 albums on SPV in 86 and 88, we invited him to share
vocals on our album on the track "Bleed Forever" and he was
more then happy to do that, it was his first appearance in the scene for
14 years!!! And we are more then happy that it's in our album, he told
us about the re-union they will maybe do and from here we wish them all
the best and the biggest success we can wish, long live ASSASSIN!!!
As you can imagine, all this process was very inspired, we were
getting closer and closer to the end of the album, mixing, adding some
stuff and all the other boring studio work we’re not going to bore you
to death with…
We came back in the beginning of August, full of great memories and
hopes for the future. 3 weeks after that we were picked up and signed by
the ever growing French label LISTENABLE for 2 albums, our album will
hit the scene in February 2003, but until then you are more then welcome
to take a look at the attached photos, get into the great experience we
had during the recording process and check out our website: www.nailwithin.com
Cheers to you all, HUGE thanks to all the great people who helped us
- see you all in 2003!!!
Yishai, Haim, Matan, Alex, Nir
Nail Within
NAIL
WITHIN
Interview with vocalist Yishai Sweartz