Accidents happen. Nailbomb being one of them. The pairing of two bandleaders (Sepultura's Max Cavalera and Fudge Tunnel's Alex Newport) from two completely different parts of the world, Brazil and England; Nailbomb and its only studio album, Point Blank, may have been one of the heaviest, most envelope-pushing sound ever put to tape. Their intent: "To make the fucking heaviest album ever." To this day, Nailbomb's Point Blank promise has never been broken. This album is the noisiest, heaviest, most brutally fucked up two man pile-up of anger, groove and noise for noise's sake you've ever heard.
THE INCEPTION:
Winter 1993. "It was right after the show (Sepultura did for the Arise album) on the Ministry tour," explains Max about the origins of Nailbomb. "The rest of the band went to Brazil. But since my son Zyon was about to be born, I stayed in Phoenix. Alex (Newport - singer and guitarist with UK headcrushers, Fudge Tunnel, and at the time married to Max's wife's daughter) was staying in Phoenix at the same time, and we saw each other a lot since he is from England and he didn't know anybody. We had similar tastes and a lot of similar ideas." The duo initially came up with Hate Project as the name of their new alliance, then quickly switched to Sickman, before finally setlling on the name that they felt most truly captured the impact of their sound - Nailbomb.
THE INTENT:
"To make the fucking heaviest album ever," stated Max at the time. "We thought it would be worth it to do something different from our own bands and create an album with different stuff, with a lot of heavier, crazier shit on it. That's what Nailbomb is all about."
That and kicking against the pricks of mainstream music in the early nineties. "The climate was "pretty bad," recalls Alex. "There was some good music in the underground scene. I felt like people were more open to what we were doing with Nailbomb than they would have been before the mid-nineties. Bands like Nirvana, Helmet, Ministry, etc. had opened a few doors musically as far as being heavy, yet not strictly metal." Nailbomb's sound combined those genre-defying bands as a point of departure, while bringing in their own specific loves, incorporating Max's predilection for the primal hardcore of Discharge and Doom with Alex's love of Killing Joke and early industrial rock. "The priority for this record was simple," Max recalls. "More guitatrs, man!"
THE RECORDING:
A bit of funding came from Roadrunner Records, whose all-around A&R guru Monte Conner heard a very primal Nailbomb demo and offered to support Cavalera and Newport's vision. For the most part, the album was recorded in the spirit with which it was conceived: lo-tech. Recording was done in pieces. Some sessions were done with a sampler in the bedroom of Zyon's nanny. "It's really, really funny," Max recalls. "Because she's really Catholic and she has all these posters of the Virgin Mary and all that, and we we're doing this crazy shit in there. Every day she walked into the room, she probably thought we were lost!"
THE OUTCOME:
The record, titled Point Blank, is that alloy in-extremis. From the intro of "Wasting Away" to the hypnotic groove of "Cockroaches" to the brutal (and brilliant titled) low-end-and-sample-dominated "Shit Piñata," Nailbomb created a record that not only lives up to its title, but also its main collective CV's. "Musically, it's pretty much a crossover of the two bands," Max asserts. "Some of the stuff that me and Alex are into we didn't put in out bands. I like a lot of hardcore from Europe, bands like GBH. He like a lot of Big Black. Fudge Tunnel once said to Alex "Why didn't you keep that fucking riff for us?!?!?!" Max laughingly recalls. "As for the industrial thing, that was more Alex's idea than mine. I wanted to be careful of how much we went with that - there already was a Ministry. My idea was to have more of a hardcore project with samples. The end product is a full-on-blast - death metal distortion on punk guitar."
Originally titled 1,000% Hate, the album's cover was as provocative as the music itself: a well known Vietnam-era photo of a gun barrel pointed at the head of a peasant woman. It summed up the "message" of Nailbomb in stark black and white. "People have said [the cover] promotes guns, violence, and war," states Alex. "No, all its doing is showing reality. I'm not saying that Nailbomb is going to change the world, but it may make someone think that it's not all sweetness in life, it's not the land of milk and honey, after all. If we don't do something about it, it's going to be too late."
At the time, and to this day, Nailbomb was never meant to be anything but a studio project. "Nailbomb is the "Anti-band," was Max's mission-statement at the time. "Nailbomb does everything a 'band' doesn't. We are never going to really tour. We might do 2 or 3 dates."
THE SHOW:
Make that one date: June 3, 1995 at Holland's metal-meltdown, the Dynamo Festival. The one-time-only live affair was as unconventional as Nailbomb itself, with that day's membership featuring the likes of Igor Cavalera, Fear Factory/Front line Assembly's Rhys Fulber, Biohazard's Evan Seinfeld, Tribe After Tribe's Barry C. Schneider, Doom's Scoot Doom, Neurosis' Dave Edwardson and even Max's stepson, Ritchie Cavalera, bowing in on second guitar. Documented on the Roadrunner-released live album, Proud To Commit Commercial Suicide, the set-list that night was nearly entirely culled from Point Blank, with the exception of a cover of the Dead Kennedy's "Police truck" (featuring ex-DK's man, Darren Peligro on drums). A few new studio tracks(the band's last-ever recorded output) were tacked on to the end of Proud To.... as a bonus: "While You Sleep, I Destroy Your World," with its cool-as-fuck drum loop and the ominous steel-cage-closing-in-hell closer, "Zero Tolerance."
That showw was also the day Nailbomb called it quits - at least for the moment. "It was agreed that we would split up the day of the show. Why? Because we would rather keep Nailbomb as intense as the day we started."
THE LEGACY:
"I don't think we'd be able to match the energy and fury of Point Blank," states Alex, who currently spends his time as a producer (having recorded the likes of At The Drive In's early offerings as well as System Of A Dowm's second demo) and blasting eardrums in a new band called Theory Of Ruin. "That album was recorded at a particular time, in a particular place, with a particular mood, and those factors came together and made the album what it is. But, that was a while ago, and the circumstances are not the same now, and I don't think it would be possible to match the feeling of Point Blank. Best to let it be what it is. A follow up record would only be dissapointing."
