Interview: Front Line Assembly

Fall 1994
by Sean G. Thomas

When Front Line Assembly frontman Bill Leeb breaks from discussing his new album Millennium to talk about Quentin Tarantino's Letterman appearance the night before, two things become clear: one, Leeb's far from the humorless control freak that his band's steel-trap techno-thrash albums might make you fear, and two, soon the Pulp Fiction hype-wagon will crush us all.

Actually, I brought up Tarantino's name in conjunction with Reservoir Dogs, a movie I was surprised they hadn't sampled. I spoke too soon: "Sex Offender", Millennium's spooky found-sound final cut, contains a buried sample of the now-infamous ear-slicing scene. Calling from the band's home of Vancouver, Leeb then excitedly mentioned that FLA also sampled Harvey Keitel's grim masturbation scene from the film The Bad Lieutenant ("It synched perfectly with the rhythm track"), but couldn't legally clear it for the album. When I remarked it might be just as well to avoid that controversy, he laughed. "Oh, we're gonna use it live! Come on out, we'll offend everybody!"

Offense and mutilation are hardly new themes for industrial acts, from Throbbing Gristle to Nine Inch Nails to Leeb's first band Skinny Puppy, and Leeb freely admits his fascination with humanity's darker side. But whereas many bands from the mid-80s industrial movement found themselves, in Leeb's words, "easily pigeonholed" and quickly forgotten, the FLA singer feels his band has avoided that trap and even been "reinvented". So what's their secret, the special ingredient, or as Bill puts it, "the key to the golden city"?

"You'd be amazed, when you take a guitar and put it on top of anything... there's a 100% change. If we took the guitars off now, it'd sound empty." Leeb speaks with the conviction of a recent convert, which in a sense he is: Millennium, released October 11 on Roadrunner Records, marks the first appearance of live guitar on a Front Line Assembly album - and we're not talking FLA Unplugged either.

"Rhys [Fulber, FLA's other official member] listens to a lot of Prong and Carcass... we used two guitarists in the studio, and we sampled some Pantera and other new metal bands." The result is startling, if not entirely unfamiliar to scenesters used to seeing the same songs on Headbanger's Ball and 120 Minutes. As always, the band's strength lies in balancing a dozen diverse elements at once, from hip-hop-inspired beats and stuttering bass sequences to their ubiquitous, if not always identifiable, barrage of samples - and now grinding metal guitars.

In many ways, it seems that the musical world is finally catching up with techniques employed by industrial acts for years. Leeb agrees and elaborates: "[Our new style] wasn't that big a jump. Hip-hop uses drum machines, sequencers and samplers all the time, but they get their credibility from the street and what they've gone through. An electronic band can use the same instruments, but critics will call it cold and emotionless... and three-fourths of the people out there won't listen to it."

But as Leeb and Fulber heard the new styles springing up around them, "we realized our musical tastes were changing. We wanted to be broader, and said, 'Why don't we do an album that sounds like the music we're listening to?' We've always been a purist electronic band, but working with guitarists and rappers has really helped us grow." So much so that the band scrapped an entire album's worth of more electronic tracks, recorded before the sessions that became Millennium.

The irony of their new - yet more traditional - direction is not lost on Leeb, especially in light of their deal with metal-oriented Roadrunner Records. "When Third Mind [FLA's former independent label, no longer associated with the band] set up the distribution deal with Roadrunner, who would have thought we'd be incorporating our music with theirs? Two years ago, we never would have approached them ourselves." Indeed, 1992's Tactical Neural Implant album, their first with the new label, was the band's most polished and low-key yet, a far cry from the often brutal intensity of Millennium. But, as Leeb laughingly notes, "I've already done interviews with 15 or 20 metal magazines, and they wouldn't have come near us before!"

Leeb has spoken candidly in the past on his feelings about Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, spurred by a 1992 Spin article in which Reznor singled out FLA as an example of "bad industrial". But now Leeb resignedly refers to him as "a very smart guy... who took a familiar element, the guitar, used it in electronic music, and made a lot of money on it." This grudging respect seems typical of the band's more open-minded approach. Even the lyrics eschew industrial's standard expressions of hopelessness for what Leeb describes as "a struggle for identity, and more spiritual insight... how to combat being a prisoner within the system." Not coincidentally, Millennium is the first FLA album to include a lyric sheet.

With a new video for the album's title track already shot by Eric Zimmerman, responsible for NIN's "Head Like a Hole" and Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose" promos, and their first tour with a full band (including guitarist Devon Townsend, featured on Millennium and a former bandmate of Steve Vai) set for early next year, the group's immediate future is pretty well spoken for. Yet both Leeb and Fulber are involved in several side projects, and neither knows where their new musical direction might take them. "Once your eyes are open, you can experiment with any different style of music," says Leeb. "We have no idea what our next album will sound like -- jazz-tech? Who knows?"

One final word on Tarantino, this time from Bill Leeb himself: "On Letterman, he said he worked in a video store for five years, and that the most commonly asked question is, 'What's new and good?' But I guess that's what everyone's asking." If so, Front Line Assembly have just released a very appropriate answer.

Sean G. Thomas, Sean Thomas, Sean Garrett Thomas