ACRASSICAUDA - ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD
Published: The Big Issue #355, May/June 2010.
Over the past decade, Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda went to hell and back for their music. But, while their prospects have improved since seeking asylum in the US, the band now face new challenges.
Marwan Hussein Riyadh is relieved. A decade since his he and his band of best friends played their first underground show in their former Baghdad neighbourhood, Acrassicauda finally have a record to call their own.
“It’s sweet, man!” he urges, speaking on the phone from the band’s adopted home of Brooklyn. “It feels much better knowing that people will now get to judge us for the music rather than the story.”
“It’s just overwhelming that people are enjoying it, because you know, this is who we are: we’re musicians. Being refugees is just an unfortunate part in our lives that we hope to break through one day.”
A four-track EP though it may be, the squall of detuned guitars, cavernous drums and growling vocal attack that characterises Only the Dead See the End of the War charts an experience of war, rupture, upheaval and as the 25-year-old drummer happily points out, a steadfast commitment to the metal cause.
“A lot of people get to do a lot of stuff, but really, there’s one thing meant for each person,” he says. “We were suppressed by a culture, but we knew who were and we stuck to it.”
Indeed, the Acrassicauda (the Latin name for a species of black scorpion common to the deserts of Iraq) story is almost mythical in scope. Forming in Baghdad during 2001 after meeting at university, the group (Riyadh, vocalist Faisal Tala Mustafa, guitarist Tony Aziz Yaqoo and bassist Firas Al-Lateef) have been widely credited as one the first Iraqi metal bands. Journalists and translators by day, they played underground, basement gigs and shared contraband Slayer and Metallica tapes by nightfall, becoming facilitators of the diminutive, nonetheless active Iraqi metal scene.
“Even in a third-world country, there are these micro communities,” says Riyadh. “It was the same with metal. We could be passing each other in the street and we would just recognise each other straight away, you know? The hair, the t-shirt, you know.”
“You could see a hundred or even a thousand people walking down the market bazaar in the alleys of Baghdad and then you just see that one dude with the big goatee and a Black Sabbath shirt and it was just like, ‘Ah, that’s one of us’.”
That’s not to suggest things were easy. Performing under the Ba’ath Party’s rigid censorship regime proved a trial in itself, with the band being forced to perform songs with pro-Saddam lyrics. Access to music, on the other hand, required careful planning. “It was extremely, extremely hard to get your hands on stuff, but metal heads need to feed,” says Riyadh with a laugh. “It usually came from someone who had travelled outside and smuggled back a couple of cassettes, or somebody got their relatives to send them some CDs or tapes hidden in other packages.”
“Other times, a couple of metal guys would infiltrate a radio station and once every twenty songs or something, play ‘Roots, Bloody Roots’ but Sepultura or something,” he laughs again. “It was like ‘Am I hearing right?’.”
When American forces invaded Baghdad in March, 2003, however, the band’s prospects dived further, with the city and their lives thrown into chaos. Mounting violence, constant power outages and the destruction of city infrastructure made rehearsing, let alone performing, a near impossible proposition. They continued on regardless. “There is always that kind of survival instinct,” says Riyadh. “If they closed this loophole then we would find another one, another way to keep the band going.”
It was only after a bomb blast tore through their rehearsal space and Saddam-loyalists made threats on their lives that the quartet fled across the border to Syria in 2006. After US publisher Vice released a documentary on the band in 2007, they were granted asylum status in the United States and made the move to Brooklyn in 2008, where they could finally set about tracking Only the Dead See the End of the War.
Recorded under the watchful eye and ear of legendary Testament lead guitarist Alex Skolnick, the results speak for themselves. A storm of roaring guitars writhe amid chugging tempo shifts on tracks like ‘Massacre’, where ‘Garden of Stones’ sees the band feed traditional Arabic percussion and vocalisation into searing thrash metal. Perhaps the most powerful track, however, is the record’s towering closer ‘The Unknown’, which explores themes of discrimination and otherness in a unfamiliar land. Unsurprisingly, it was the one song on the EP written in the States.
“The fact that we were so young when we left Iraq – like, I was only 21 – and just arriving in America only about a year later, I can’t even begin to explain how overwhelming the psychology and the mental struggle is,” explains Riyadh.
“‘The Unknown’ was really that, you know, about the psychological aspects of being a foreigner. The fear of the unknown; not knowing what to do; not knowing where to belong; being stuck between two cultures.”
That said, acclimatising to New York City’s frantic lifestyle isn’t such a challenge when there’s the reward of unhindered rehearsal at day’s end. “That’s one great thing about the music,” urges Riyadh. “It actually stops time. As much as you work on the music, the music will give you back.”
For Acrassicauda, it’s a mantra that’s finally beginning to ring true. “A lot of people over the years thought we were going to give up, but we didn’t,” offers Riyadh proudly.
“We believed that one day the music would give back. It’s not quite happening yet,” he laughs. “But it’s a start.”
by Dan Rule
Only the Dead See the End of the War is out now through Vice/Inertia
