“I have been reborn under the fallen light”. And with the release last summer of their new album, The Ones I Condemn, Canadian thrash legends Sacrifice have done exactly that. Sixteen years after their last release, Sacrifice have found themselves reigning at Number 1 on Earshot’s “Loud” charts, and knocking over critics and fans alike with this brutally brilliant album.

Back with their original lineup, Rob Urbinati, Joe Rico, Scott Watts and Gus Pynn have reemerged with the kind of thunderous, ground shaking metal we expect from Sacrifice.
Tight guitar assaults…check. One-of-a-kind, brutal lyrics with unmistakable vocals….check. Headbanging tracks with absolutely no filler songs…check. With only two shows scheduled in 2009, I made the trek up to Toronto to finally witness them live. I was able to catch up with singer and guitarist Rob Urbinati before their sardine-packed show at the Opera House, to find out just what he thought of this rebirth of a band, the state of musical recording, and the new generation of thrash.

Since the release this summer, what has been the response to the Condemn album?

It’s been really good. It seems like every review we get is, ”It’s outstanding.” We were joking around, talking to the guy at the label the other day, saying “I’m just waiting for one that just says it’s average or something.” Every review gets like nine out of ten, four out of five, whatever, five out of five. It’s been great. Mostly though, to hear from just fans of the band, saying you know “Fuck, we’ve been waiting for this album for so long. So many bands get back together and put out crap. And it’s so amazing to hear this album.” That means the most to us.

What was the driving force behind releasing the back catalog?

A few people had contacted us about putting it out. And eventually Armando from Marquee Records got in touch with us, and he had the best ideas for what we were into. .
People were putting out reissues at the time, and they were just crappy. You couldn’t wait to get this old Exciter album, and you’d bring it home, and there would be one cheap insert thing in it, and it hadn’t be remastered and stuff. And we didn’t want that, we wanted something cool. He said, “You guys have so many bootlegs on the market right now. The only way to get rid of them is you have to put out something that’s way better than everybody else is putting out. And then no one’ll want that crap.” And he had great ideas and we were totally on board with everyone. In some way I think maybe the Marquee stuff that he’s re-released has kind of pushed other bigger labels when they’re re-releasing stuff, to put a little bit more effort into it. So that’s a good by-product of it.

Do you think making it availably digitally , on iTunes and Amazon and those outlets have brought a younger audience to Sacrifice?

Ummm…I dunno if it’s so much done that. I mean the hard thing is, you put your stuff out there on iTunes and Amazon and that, and you just hope people pay for it. It’s hard to get people to pay for something that they get for free. But yeah, seems like our younger audience is more into doing that, downloading the stuff. And hopefully they feel good enough about it that they’ll pay for it!

If I’m right, you guys grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. What were the bands of the musicians that made you really sit up and really listen for the first time?

I think for me, the first one was probably KISS. I don’t how old I was when I started getting really into KISS. Maybe eleven or twelve? But even before that, my brothers are all older than me and they always had tons of records around the house. My mom tells me when I was four years old, I’d have my brother’s Alice Cooper record out. I just thought it was cool ‘cause Welcome to My Nightmare, there’s bugs all over it and stuff. And I’d put that on. They had all kinds of records hanging around, so I was always listening to that stuff. But KISS was the first band I got into on my own. My brothers weren’t into it. And I really really got into KISS (laughing) and then it went onto to Sabbath from there, and whoever else after that.

To take it even further, what influenced you to pick up your instrument?
What was your guitar influence?

Probably Ace Frehley. Tony Iommi too. I mean to this day he’s my favorite guitar player I think. Randy Rhoads was big. Eddie Van Halen, Ritchie Blackmore, guys like that.

Are you self taught?

I took lessons for a little while. I didn’t take them for that long. Actually when I met Joe (Rico) from Sacrifice, he probably taught me more on guitar than anybody did. When we first started getting together, he was way better than me. He still is. He taught me quite a bit on guitar. He was probably my best guitar teacher, actually.

Is he the whammy bar guy?

I probably play more whammy bar than him, but he is much better. He’s miles ahead of me.

Most Sacrifice fans know that you prefer the pure sound in your recording, versus the digitally enhanced sound. Do you think that albums like The Ones I Condemn will bring back that sound in recordings?

I hope so. I hope it at least gets even a couple of bands to do it. Just because, I think now too many albums sounds the same. With the whole drum triggering and editing thing, for me, it makes things sound too mechanical. There’s no humanity. There’s no emotion in it anymore. I don’t think people have a grasp of how much music is edited, even guitar. I mean guys can go in now and play a riff once and repeat four times on the computer and that’s that one bar…done. You know, they don’t even go in and play the whole guitar track through anymore. And when I hear this stuff and see it happening, really, I just hate it.

The thing is, the temptation is too great...when you’re in the studio and your drummer maybe speeds up or slows down a bit, or hits something a tiny bit off. We didn’t even go in with a click track, just because we didn’t even want that temptation there to fix it. We wanted to go in and record and make it sound like people were actually doing it. ‘Cause otherwise you might as well go in with a drum machine. That’s all I hear on recording now. It sounds like a drum machine. Even if I was a drummer I wouldn’t allow that.

It’s appreciated by the fans…the real sound.

Well I’m glad! (laughing) Because I was wondering when we decided to go that route, if people actually would appreciate it. But yeah, it sounds like people do. I even hear from musicians saying “Thank God somebody’s willing to do this. “

Along the lines of the whole drumming thing…how did you get Gus (Pynn) back in?

Well, when we broke up, when Gus left the band after Soldiers of Misfortune, we didn’t talk for a long time. I mean, we’re talking probably over ten years. And our breakup was a little bitter. But one Christmas, (bassist) Scott (Watts) was in town and we ended up getting together. I can’t even remember the circumstances, but we all ended up out in Gus’s part of town. And it was like, we didn’t even discuss old crap. It was like picking up where we left off. And after a while, we just said to each other “Look I don’t even wanna talk about what went on in the past”. And he was the same, so we’d forgotten about all that crap. And it’s really hard, because we grew up, we were almost like brothers. We got together when we were kids, and for that to happen it was hard on everybody in the band. I’m just glad were all back now, and it’s water under the bridge.

When you were writing the earliest songs, what was your songwriting process? Were you sitting around together writing stuff live. And twenty-some years later, what’s the process now?

When we first got together it was basically the four of us in a room. We’d say “Ok, here I got a riff” and “Here’s another riff”, and just keep building on it, and put the song together that way. Now, it’s more I took the onus of all this crap on myself. (laughing) So a lot of the stuff I write at home. When I put drums down, I leave it very simple and I keep Gus’ style in mind when I’m doing it. So I’ll bring it in to Gus and say, “Look, you know I kept this really simple, whatever, so go nuts with it.” We’ll change and polish it up from there. That’s the main way now.

The story where you mastered, I don’t know which album it was, but one of them on Beta? I love that story…

Yeah, I don’t even remember what it used to go on before DAT tape. But yeah, we mastered it onto I think it was Beta Tape!

So what was your best studio experience after the Beta times?

Well that was cool too, it was a small basement studio for our first album we went in. I think it was the next time, when we did Forward To Termination, that was our first time in a real pro studio. And it went really well. It was great to be in a good studio, and we knew we had a bunch of good songs written. So we went in there fully prepared, and it came out really good.

How did you end up being such a major part of the engineering and the mix-down?

Well, I wasn’t doing any of the engineering, but I was kind of looking for a studio around where I lived. Because I knew I was gonna be really involved in this a lot, from start to finish. Some friends of ours were recording, I didn’t even know the studio existed. But I went out there, and the engineer at the studio, Darius, we got along really good, right off the bat. And I said “We’re recording here!” that night I met him. And it worked out really well. I explained everything that we were looking for with this album. And he, I think, was kinda relieved that a band was willing to go in and record the way we did too. Because I think he gets sick of the whole over-editing process. He was great, everything went well. It was my first experience producing. It was kind of hard for me, ‘cause I know all the guys in the band so well. It’s hard to go, “why don’t we change that” or “try this different part here.” But they all trusted me in doing this, and everybody was really cool about. I think if this was another band that I didn’t know, they would have said “You’re fired!” (laughs)

It’s been I sixteen years since the last album. What kind of stuff had you done after the band broke up… musically or otherwise?

Well musically we were all playing in different bands. I did a thing after Sacrifice called Interzone. Joe was in a bunch of bands, he was in a band called Walls of Jericho for a while. He was playing in a bunch of different hardcore bands. Scott was over playing classic rock in Vancouver. And Gus was in a punk band here called The Threetards. We were all playing. We all ended up having families except for Scott. We all moved on in our lives. And I don’t think we ever thought that this was going to happen, you know that we’d be here, forty-two years old and have a new album out. I don’t think that any of us ever expected this. But it happened. And we’re having fun with it!

Was it a big surprise how well things went with the recording, and then the shows afterwards?

We were pretty confident going in with the recording. We really thought we had a bunch of excellent songs written. But you always have this thing when you go into the studio, you don’t know how the final product’s going to sound. Sometimes it can come out sounding a bit thinner than you expected, than you are used to hearing at rehearsal or something. But Darius our engineer was great. What we ended up getting at the end of the whole recording was better than we expected going in. That was a big relief for all of us. Yeah, we were really happy with how the way things went.

What would you say are your favorite newer thrash bands?

I really like Warbringer a lot, especially. They’ve made a huge jump from their first album to their new album. They’ve gone miles. And they record real. I remember seeing those guys, actually at this venue here (the Opera House, Toronto). I was talking to both Johns and I said “If you guys record with triggers and all that shit on your drums…I’m gonna fucking kill you!” And they go “No, no we’re not doing that!” (laughing) There really cool guys, I really like the band. I like the Australian bands, like Destroyer 666 are pretty cool. And Razor of Occam are excellent too. I mean there’s good thrash. There a lot of really crappy ones too. Municipal Waste is cool, they’ve got that crossover thing happening, I like them. There are a lot of good bands around, but yeah its oversaturated now, I think.

Do you think the iPod generation can carry the torch?

The whole digital thing is great. It’s not like the old days where you have to carry around a ghetto blaster and your pockets were full of cassette tapes and stuff. I’m hoping people will still want some kind of physical thing they can hold in their hand. Because the unfortunate thing about the iPod shit is, it seems like people grasp maybe two songs off of an album, that’s what goes onto their iPod. There’s no whole album experience anymore. There’s no putting on a record and listening to the whole thing. I’m guilty of this too. I’m just hoping this vinyl thing comes back and comes back in a big way, where people will actually buy it and it won’t just be the iPod.

Of late there have been a lot of big name bands putting together larger package tours, like the Slayer - Testament - Megadeth thing that was just announced. If you guys were offered a package tour like that that, would you take it?

Uhhh…probably not. Honestly the chances of us getting on a package tour where we would say “ok”, it’s not gonna happen. Like U2 isn’t gonna go, ”Hey Sacrifice! You guys wanna tour with us?” (laughing) Not that that would be a good bill. But you know, it’d be a good paying thing.