Northern hyperblast Canadian legends Kataklysm have spent the last 18 years building a rock solid reputation that shows no sign of weakening. It’s so strong, in fact, that frontman Maurizio Iacono felt it was high time to expand his horizons in the form of Ex Deo, a long-suffering tribute-in-mind to the Roman Empire. The objective has been achieved in the form of the epic debut, Romulus, a larger-than-life look at the legends and history surrounding the rise and fall of Rome. Rather than cut ties with his Kataklysm bandmates to get the job done Iacono ultimately had no choice but to keep Ex Deo in the family, and the results are astounding. Nary a blastbeat to be heard, music paced to a pagan metal Amon Amarth march and a vocal performance unlike anything he’s pulled off before, Iacono has done the unthinkable and taken his band in an entirely new direction. Nobody is complaining, however, as Iacono applied the same unwritten rule to Ex Deo as he follows with Kataklysm: go big or go home.
“There wouldn’t have been any point to doing it if it was going to be even close to Kataklysm,” Iacono agrees. “We worked really hard to make sure it doesn’t sound like Kataklysm even if the same guys are involved in making the music. Even with the advertisements for the album, I made sure they (the label) tell people that you can’t compare Ex Deo to Kataklysm because I didn’t want to lure Kataklysm fans into this. We have a very strong fanbase, but labels tend to go ‘Hey man, Kataklysm fans will dig this…’ but that isn’t what I’m looking for. Ex Deo is something very different.”
“It wasn’t a conscious decision because with the ideas we had coming into this we knew it automatically couldn’t sound like Kataklysm. We would have had to write the same way in order for that to happen. Ex Deo is something that needed to sound epic, it needed to have keyboards, it needed to have a different guitar tuning. Even the production is different. Listen to the drum sound; it’s super-organic, whereas Kataklysm is more triggered. It’s just different, and it’s something you can bob your head to the whole way through.”
As Iacono tells it the road to Ex Deo’s birth was a long one, held up by his rather high profile day job. He explains:
“When I first came up with the idea for Ex Deo, years ago, there wasn’t enough time to focus on it and put things together. Kataklysm was always touring, there was a lot of hype surrounding the band and we had to capitalize on that and keep touring, keep putting records out because the momentum was so big. But, at some time everyone needs to take a break and it was that time for Kataklysm. We did the Prevail campaign, but we couldn’t keep going for another 10 years doing 20 tours and then a record and then more touring (laughs). We needed to give it a breather, both for ourselves and the fans so that everyone wants Kataklysm back in the bloodstream later on. When we finally decided that we were going to take a break I realized it was the perfect time for me to actually come out with Ex Deo.”
“I didn’t want to release this for any other purpose except for myself,” he adds. “I wanted to release it on a small label, no gimmick or huge thought process behind it. Just for me. But, because I’m under contract with Nuclear Blast with Kataklysm I had to send demos to them first, and when they heard it they flipped. In a good way. They loved it and they wanted to push it, so I told them that if we were going to do it we had to do it big. If it was going to be on a big label we needed the visuals, we needed everything, and as you can tell they were totally behind it.”
Considering the nature of what Iacono has created it had to be as big as it is. The Roman Empire didn’t go down in history for being a collective of pussies.
“Exactly, and that was my point. It’s like, if it was on a small label and just for me, then there would be no point pulling out all the stops. But, being on a major label and just putting the album out with nothing behind it? That would be stupid. I also have about 100 family members in Italy, and I knew that if I were to screw this up I’d never hear the end of it (laughs). I grew up with this, and as a kid my mother would always say ‘In bocca al lupo’ (‘In the mouth of the wolf’) which is an old saying, like a blessing, wishing that the wolf would protect me and keep me safe. My mother said that when I left to go on tour, for example. I always took that for granted, I never really understood why people would say it, but as I grew up I learned the history and found that it went back to Romulus and Remus being taken care of by the wolf that raised them. It’s amazing that something so far away still echoes everywhere you go in Italy to this day. So, giving this album the proper character was important.”
The importance of how Iacono presented Ex Deo was twofold. There’s the music that drives the concept and there’s the historical content of the lyrics, with the latter being the harder of the two to convey as any deep lyrical meaning in death metal is often drowned out by the vocal delivery. According to Iacono there was no room to fake it on Romulus; the story absolutely had to be there. It was more a question of what to include and what to leave out.
“There are two sides to this band,” he says. “One side of it honours the Roman Empire, like the song ‘In Her Dark Embrace’, which is a big part of it. And then there’s the other side which goes into detail about Caesar his conquests. The problem I had was getting into this, which I debated at the beginning; should I go chronological or not? Chronological would have been crazy; doing Romulus’ time would have taken three records (laughs). It’s not possible to cover 1,000 years in chronological order, so I focused on it in the frame of mind that there would only be one Ex Deo record. Who knows if I’ll do another one, even though I really want to. I wanted to hit the cool stuff immediately and introduce it in the right way.”
Coming into Ex Deo and Romulus is particularly interesting following an album like Prevail in that all of Kataklysm’s members performed on the record. A few additional players were brought in to beef things up, but it’s safe to say Kataklysm have accomplished what many veteran bands going through the obligatory “experimental” phase of their careers wish they could pull off. An entirely new musical direction.
“The reason why it’s the same guys, it’s a crazy story,” says Iacono. “I had no intention whatsoever of using the Kataklysm guys, and I had a lot of people from other bands in mind to put Ex Deo together. But, I was running out of time and I needed to do the demo because I was going to Europe and I wanted to put the demo in the label’s hands. I could tell the guys were kind of bummed out I didn’t ask them, because I was talking about this project and I had the concept together. I asked my bass player (Stephane Barbe) to do it because he’s originally a guitar player - he studied classical guitar for 15 years and he’s actually a better guitar player than a bass player (laughs) – and he wrote most of the record with me. Because I was running out of time I asked the other Kataklysm guys if they could help out just with the demo, and thought nothing of it. I told them what I wanted, what my inspiration was, I had all kinds of pictures and posters related to the Roman Empire up in the studio and I told them that when they were doing the music they had to be in that zone. They understood what I meant, and when I got the music back I fell off my chair (laughs). It was like, ‘What the fuck? You guys did this?’ And that’s all she wrote. I knew we had to keep it with these guys.”
The icing on cake is Jonathan Leduc, keyboardist for Montreal’s up-and-come extreme folk metal bashers Blackguard. Considered a creative powerhouse by Blackguard frontman Paul Ablaze, Iacono credits Leduc for giving Romulus its epic soundtrack feel.
“This guy is just a young kid but he’s got the vision, he had exactly what I needed to get done on this record. When Jo was putting it together he wanted me to leave the music with him, which was hard for me to do because I didn’t want to lose control of the situation. He was like, ‘Yeah, just leave me the songs. I’ll work on them from midnight until 8:00am, smoking weed the whole way…’ I just looked at him and said I didn’t think weed was the right way to go with this (laughs), but he was a fan of the music so when I got it back I was blown away. I gave him some pointers because it had to have that grandiose feel, of course, but holy fuck he did an amazing job (laughs). I’m very satisfied.”
Considering the risk posed to his and Kataklysm’s reputation Iacono has every right to be pleased with himself.
“I did take a huge risk,” Iacono agrees. “I did take a lot of things into consideration going into it, but at the same time I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t take that risk. I had to go into with a full-fledged commitment to it. I’m happy things came together because Ex Deo is one of those things where I rolled the dice, but I made sure they were tricked (laughs). And it’s exploded. If you go to YouTube and you watch that video, check out the comments. People are shocked that Ex Deo is the Kataklysm guys, they’re freaking out. The label has been giving me all this positive feedback, and my agent in Europe has been telling me about bands out of Italy and Greece coming out with history-based stuff. We’re in a time when people think you can’t do something new, so if Ex Deo inspires people, cool.”
It has also put the call out to bring Romulus to the stage. Europe will be first to see Ex Deo live when the band hits the road as part of the Paganfest in the fall.
“I wasn’t really into the idea of touring for this,” Iacono admits, “but there was a lot of pressure from the label and a huge demand from the fans. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest. And yeah, the Kataklysm guys will be with me. They’re my bothers, man, and they did so much work on this album with me, so I can’t just go ‘Cool, thanks guys, I’ve got some other dudes for the show, goodbye.’ They want to tour for it, so it’ll be the family back on the road (laughs).”
As for life beyond Ex Deo, a new Kataklysm record is in the early stages of planning. Suffice to say the band will be back to their “old” selves by the time they’re ready to hit the studio.
“The idea at this point is to write the next Kataklysm record little by little next year and maybe focus on it during the summer,” Iacono reveals. “We’re actually going to rent a cabin in Northern Quebec and lock ourselves away to write because we’ve never done that and I think it’s time. And I think this Ex Deo stuff has lit a fire under our asses because it forced us to go into ourselves and find a new way of exploring our musical abilities.”
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