CaliAlive.com

Date: September 2005
By Mike Macias
Iron Sloth Website: myspace.com/theironsloth

I recently got a chance to think up some questions I've wanted to ask The Abominable Iron Sloth. Since they've live pretty far, I figured why not just do in through email. So this message was done back and forth via myspace. The Sloth will be playing down at Koo's Cafe in Long Beach on October 1st. So if you get a chance check them out. We talked about how they came up with their name, their main influences, whats going on with the new material they recorded, and they even told us about their hearse/camry that they drive around when they have shows. A few paragraphs down you can also find one of their newest songs that they let us put up before they put out their next release.

CALIALIVE: Ok. Lets start this off assuming that most people know nothing about The Abominable Iron Sloth. Other than hearing a few mp3s and seeing you guys live (once), I don’t know anything about you guys. Tell us your names & what you guys do in the band, where your from, & how long you’ve been writing this extremely heavy music.

Well my names Justin, and I don't know how to play guitar and I scream incoherently if you write for the local college rag. I guess you could say I started this band about 2 years ago with my friend Scott playing drums. He doesn't really even know how to play drums and the band was somewhat of a joke at first (it was called Bloodsocket for about 2 weeks). However I soon realized that people actually seemed to like the songs and so I decided to come up with a "real" name. I wanted something that was dirty, heavy, and slow moving so I went to synonym.com and typed in those words. What came out was Abominable, Iron, and Sloth. I talked Cayle into recording drums for 4 songs I'd written and we recorded a demo at a house here in Chico. We played several shows as a 2 piece and one day we were practicing and Cayles bandmates in his other band Ghostride came by and they loved it. They were also in one of my favorite bands ever called Willhaven so it's a good feeling to know that they like something I do. We play shows as a 5 piece with 3 guitars, and we also still play shows with just Cayle and myself. It's easy to play as a 2 piece cause we can just drive around in my 400 dollar 1986 toyota camry that I cut in half and turned into a hearse (I work at a custom metal shop) and we can drive just about anywhere at 35 mpg verses the average 8 mpg for a van. We can also fit 3 4x12 cabinets, 2 heads, a drumkit, merch and all our other shit in it so we're pretty efficient when we roll that way.

CALIALIVE: I seen you guys play the last time you were in Southern California. It was at Showcase Theatre and it was my bands last show. There were maybe 25 people there, but no doubt it was a fun show. I know you guys ran into some shitty times during that trip down here. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again when you guys come down October 1st.

Actually we loved that show, I don't know how turnout usually is for shows in So Cal, but it's hard to get a crowd that size up here for a metal show. For some reason I thought Santa Cruz was near LA so we booked a show there the day before and it ended up taking 10 hours to get to corona from there. It was memorial day weekend and traffic sucked the whole way, but we managed to pull up to the showcase about 10 minutes before we were supposed to play so it ended up alright.

CALIALIVE: I was shocked to see that you guys were only a two-piece at this show, and somehow you were one of the loudest bands Ive ever seen. It was just like an unstoppable wall of sound. Was your other band member sick or were you guys not able to squeeze him into the car?

All five of us were supposed to roll down there in a van, but we found out the day before that it was too late to get insurance on it. The only options we had were to roll down as a 2 piece or not play the shows at all, so we gave it a shot.

CALIALIVE: Above is one of The Sloth’s newest songs. Tell us about this song and your upcoming release. Is it going to be a demo, EP, or a full length album?

Well it's one of the newer ones we recorded and it will be on the cd we're releasing hopefully in late october. It's basically the 4 songs we recorded last year with new tracks from our new 3 members and 5 new ones that we did at the same house as well.