Eddie Hermida and Mark Heylmun from the California deathcore powerhouse give us the rundown of their favourite songs and why.
Deftones – 976/EVIL
Eddie: “This song is like a message to God, and a message to a child also, it’s all encompassing in my opinion of what the lyrics mean. I love how heavy the song is, but they can turn something so heavy into something so beautiful. It’s not a very driving song – most of the music I listen to is music to get on your motorcycle to and ride as fast as you can – but this song slows it down, and has a pounding, heavy chorus. The singing over it is really beautiful. Every time I hear that chorus the hair on the back of my neck stands up and I tear up a little bit.”
Ozzy Osbourne – Dee
Mark: “It’s on Blizzard Of Ozz, an Ozzy Osbourne album, but I look at it more as a Randy Rhoads song because it’s just an acoustic guitar and it made me completely obsessed with what I would call a classical nylon string guitar. It’s only like 46 seconds but you can find extended versions of it – it’s a badass tune. I like the extended one ‘cause you can hear Randy and the producer talking and recording different takes.”
Cannibal Corpse – Hammer Smashed Face
Eddie: “My buddy and I walked into a record story and decided we were going to pick out the two craziest records we could find. He picked out Cannibal Corpse’s Tomb Of The Mutilated and I picked Suffocation’s Pierced From Within – this was strictly on record covers only, we didn’t know anything about the bands. At this point the heaviest stuff we’d listened to was Alice In Chains. We decided we were going to listen to his first ‘cause it was the more brutal looking one and I remember when the first chugs started and when the blast beats kicked in… I’d never heard a blast beat before and I couldn’t get how the drummer was playing it. We both thought he must have been standing up playing it! Still to this day, when Cannibal Corpse release a song it’s the heaviest thing ever. They’re the death metal band.”
The Who – Baba O’Riley
Mark: “The Who are probably my favourite band of all time, when it really comes down to songwriting and storytelling rock ‘n’ roll. I feel like Pete Townshend wrote really good songs, Roger Daltrey has a really rugged voice, Keith Moon had the full driving metal drums – the spine of their music is the drums. And Keith was always all over the place, it’s easy to listen to The Who and not realise how crazy the drums are going ‘cause he was so good weaving in crazy shit within the music. And Baba O’Riley is an amazing tune. I heard they wrote it after playing Woodstock and seeing all the American teenagers all fucked up and not paying attention to the music. There’s always a good story behind their songs.”
Pantera – I’m Broken
Eddie: “I used to watch MTV a lot as a kid and that video made me want to be in a band. For the whole video, from beginning to end, they’re going crazy – they look like they’re having so much fun just in this little basement room. It’s nothing fancy whereas at the time it was nothing but fancy, expensive videos, but these guys just went in there and jammed and that’s what made me really love heavy music. They’re one of those bands that just couldn’t give a fuck, were full of anger, but were so musically proficient.”
Black Sabbath – A National Acrobat
Mark: “It’s got a bluesy groove that’s kind of a breakdown. Then it goes into the riff that’s heavy as hell. People always cover Sabbath but I’ve never heard anybody cover that song. Maybe we’ll cover it someday, I jam it all the time.”
The Beatles – Hey Jude
Eddie: “They’re the first band that got me into rock ‘n’ roll and the ‘alternative’ music style. My mom was really into The Beatles and she had this double-disc Best Of The Beatles and we’d listen to them all the time. I remember one day she told me the story behind the record… She had a big record collection at home but her house got robbed and they took every one of her records, thousands of dollars worth in the ‘70s, but this record remained. The song Hey Jude always reminds me of my mom, and I have a tattoo on my chest that’s dedicated to my mom including the beginning notes to Hey Jude.”
Pantera – Domination
Mark: “I made the progression from classic rock to ‘80s metal to Slayer when I was growing up, but when I was listening to Slayer I wanted more precise riffage so Pantera was the next step. I bought Cowboys From Hell and Domination was the most intense song I’d ever heard when I was in fourth grade. I used to think it said ‘Fart stinks like a motherfucker’ at the start of the song but recently I found out it was Vinnie Paul saying ‘First take like a motherfucker’. That song has so much in it, it’s more of a groovy thrash sort of thing. Everything about that song is just perfect. The footage of Pantera playing Domination at Monsters Of Rock has been set in my head forever.”
Alice In Chains – Rooster
Eddie: “When I first started being in bands I felt like I was the Rooster. I felt like people were always out to get me for some reason and I had all this adversity to go through – and that couldn’t be more true now. The song is also hard as fuck, when Layne Staley goes into the really high singing parts you get floored every time ‘cause he’s pissed but he’s got such a beautiful voice. You can tell there’s a lot of angst and pain coming from him and Jerry Cantrell. Alice In Chains will always remain one of my favourite bands on Earth and that song I’ve related to from a very young age and I still do today.”
Metallica – Dyers Eve
Mark: “I only recently started admitting this but I stole …And Justice For All from my cousin when we house sat at his house while he and his parents were on vacation. There was all this hippy rock like Fish that I wasn’t really into, but he had that album and I thought ‘I want that CD, I bet he doesn’t listen to it any more so he won’t even notice’. It was pretty obvious that we were house sitting then he came back and his CD was missing. But that was the first time I really listened to Metallica ‘cause Load had been out but people were saying Metallica weren’t as good any more, so I wanted to find out why people liked it so much in the first place. …And Justice For All is still my favourite Metallica record – Dyers Eve is just so angsty and as a little kid I was shaking my fist at the fucking man.”
Suicide Silence tour the UK this November with Thy Art Is Murder, Fit For An Autopsy and Black Tongue. Details in the poster below…
