Jingle bells are replaced with distorted guitars and Hosanna with ash. In a basement a stone’s throw from AF-borgen, the death metal band ’To Dust’ conveys their Christmas greeting. From all of us to all of you…
”Shit, are we really going to do this”?
Daniel Gustafsson Löfdahl, the keyboard player and the main lyricist hesitates. How is it possible to do a death metal Christmas tune without being ridiculous and without mixing it with Just D and their nerdy tune Jul igen.
The guitar player Emil Söderdahl knows. To the rehearsal he has brought his own version of We Wish You a Merry Christmas. The band sees the possibility. Let’s rock!
– We did this tune in a way that we feel confident. We gave the tune our own twist and a heavier ending, as we usually do. A cover done in the normal way would probably had been rather bad, says Emil Söderdahl.
– We didn’t think of doing this tune from the beginning, more like doing Gläns över sjö och strand, says the bass player Jens Varga.
– The tune is to some degree disharmonious, which would have suited us, Emil Söderdahl adds.
The band To Dust from Lund is composed of six metal guys who have played together for several years. On weekdays they do different things: Social studies, practical philosophy, programming, science studies and work within the food industry. And then there is guitar player Sakis Papapanagiotou, who had to follow the music video recording from the maternity ward as he became a dad last week.
– The video shooting was great fun. We had a mutual plan to make it easy listening because it is difficult to make a thing like that serious. As Catrin Jacobson, who made the film, was short of time we only had a couple of shootings. Furthermore, the fuse broke and we had to find out where to replace it. At the same time we were not used to being filmed, we had never done this before, says Emil Söderdahl.
It was not obvious to do a tune or a video recording. S-Teve was booked and Radio AF could only offer an acoustical recording. By chance they succeeded in getting a desirable recording time and an excellent sound manager at Hemgården, the bands home turf next to AF-borgen.
Daniel Gustafsson Löfdahl can see some connections between his studies in the humanities and writing texts. He is open to influences from conceptions and to mix them with existential dilemmas and critical society views. Usually disguised and abstract and not “in your face”, something that opens up to interpretation.
– This specific tune is not as carefully prepared as usual. We tried to get the feeling from the original and mix it with well known conceptions from other tunes, Wishes return to flame, flame return to amber, amber return to ashes and the ashes to dust – the exact drop, the inverted message. The To Dust feeling, the melancholy being thorough in all our texts.
Many of their friends laughed when they listened to the Christmas tune, but thought it was all right when they heard the result. Generally death metal tunes are hardly recorded, at least not any good tunes.
– Most bands have taken a tune and just played it with distortion and growl, and have not tried to adapt the tune, says the singer Fredrik Wendel.
– Our tune is the better compared to other metal Christmas tunes. Maybe not compared to the rest of our tunes, but the better compared to what other bands have produced in the genre, the bass player Jens Varga says.
During this year the success of To Dust has slowly grown. Without an actual recording contract they have recorded their first album ’State of Nothing’ and already in January they are expecting to do both music competitions and gigs. At the same time they are sharing their tunes for free on the Internet and promote themselves on Facebook.
– We actually have many Facebook-likes from Brazil. In South America they love Nordic metal and Brazil is a big metal-nation, the drummer Andreas Kjellner says.
What is a death metal Christmas?
– A difficult question. I don’t think there is one, it’s a trick, says Andreas Kjellner.
– We are exactly like those who make catchy Christmas tunes. We also do celebrate a regular Christmas even if I personally don’t like Christmas, says Emil Söderdahl.
– Emil will be home alone and feed himself with the frozen Findus Christmas box, haha, Daniel Gustafsson Löfdahl taunts.
Translation: Lars Jansson
