Portland, Oregon’s Bastard Feast (formerly Elitist) released one of my favorite records of 2014 — Osculum Infame, which Season of Mist put forth last July. The band are about to embark on a nationwide tour, and I decided to fire a few questions their way by e-mail, and received these answers (the tour dates can be found at the end of this post — and if you have a chance to catch one of these shows, DO IT!).
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I guess the uppermost thing in your minds at the moment is the tour you’re on the verge of starting. And you really didn’t fuck around with this schedule — by my count, 19 dates spanning six weeks and 14 states. Are you sure you’re ready for this? 🙂
Actually there’s ten more dates — we just didn’t have them all ready by the time we needed to start promoting the tour. And we’ve been here before touring as Elitist, so this isnt anything new for us at all. This one has come together a little tougher.
Do you have hopes of adding any more dates to the schedule (the last one I saw was in Season of Mist’s Oct 23 press release)?
As above, we have added more dates and more will probably roll in till we leave, not gonna name names but we let a booking agent work for us and he didn’t get it to come together so we had to jump in and salvage 2 weeks of tour with 2 weeks until we left.
I sure wish I could teleport to Sacramento for that first date on Halloween Night — with Eyehategod, Power Trip, and Iron Reagan on the bill with you. Especially with a Halloween Night crowd on hand and all these particular bands together in the same place, I’m wondering if you’ll make it to the second stop on the tour.
Ha, we’re wondering the same thing right..
Will you be traveling with any other bands or will there be different local lineups at each stop?
Different legs of the tour will have different bands but we are always stoked to play with our buds in Plague Widow who are joining us at the end of it. But a majority of it will be locals at each stop.
How do you plan to spend Thanksgiving on the road — since it falls between your dates in Denver and Laramie, Wyoming?
Denver — we have tons of friends so we’ll be surrounded by the homies and spend it there being degenerate assholes
If memory serves, your last tour was a West Coast run back in July. Did that one go smoothly, and what were your impressions of the crowd reactions?
Like all DIY touring, it’s ups and downs.. It was smooth, hopefully this one continues the trend. It’s been a crazy month for all of us leading up to it, so we’re hoping to go out and exorcise some of that pent up aggression.
I want to step back from the tour for a minute and ask you about “Osculum Infame”. The music is such an amalgamation of different styles, which I would say includes black metal, death metal, crust, sludge, hardcore, doom, and even thrash, that it’s hard to pigeonhole — and it’s also ferocious and abrasive as hell. All of that morphing viciousness happens to be a big part of the album’s appeal to me, but I wonder whether that “hard to classify” nature has been an obstacle to finding the kind of audience that’s going to dig it?
We never sit down and say let’s write a song like this, but more like we just play the kind of moods we are in. Fast and chaotic or slow and depressing, we do what we will to get the energy built up in us out. We also play to every kind of crowd or show, sometimes we are playing with grind bands or just doom bands. Or everything in between.
At least from my observation, the album drew a lot of critical attention when it came out earlier this year. In general, have you been satisfied with the reaction of critics and fans to the album?
I don’t necessarily care what critics think about the album, if they like it great! If not, music isn’t made for a panel of judges to thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s for the therapuetic element that is inside it. If your band plays to make critics happy, you have sold out the very healing factor that lays within this art.
The music on the album obviously represents a progression from “Fear In A Handful of Dust”, but at the same time I would have a hard time predicting where you’ll go next. The last, long song on “Osculum Infame” — “Synthetic Messiah” — is itself something of a departure from what comes before it, just on this one album. What can you tell us about the future direction of Bastard Feast’s music?
Revving it the fuck up as always. We have written 4 new songs since the album and I’d say its a similiar vein but with weirder elements thrown in. Somewhat sadder. Thanks!
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BASTARD FEAST TOUR DATES (More To Be Announced Soon….)
10/31 Sacramento @ starlite lounge
nov 2 phoenix @ 51 west venue
nov 3 Albuquerue @ sister
nov 5 austin @ red 7
nov 6 new orleans @ siberia
nov 8 tallahasse @ pete
nov 10 miami @ house show
nov 11 jacksonville @ the shantytown pub
nov 12 savannah @ the jinx
nov 20 philly @kung fu necktie
nov 21 pittsburgh @ camp clark
nov 23 indianapolis @ the melody inn
nov 24 chicago @grandbar
nov 26 denver @ Barbar
nov 28 laramie @ House show
nov 29 Salt lake city @ The shred shed
nov 30 las vegas @ the adrenaline bar
dec 1 fresno @ chinatown youth center
dec 2 oakland @ the metro
http://bastardfeast.bandcamp.com/album/osculum-infame
https://www.facebook.com/bastardfeastofficial/