BOOTLEG: NAAM’S “BLACK ICE”

In our never-ending quest to give you the best music available, we present the Revolver Bootleg series. Throughout each month, we’ll post cool, new, and often-exclusive tracks right here for you to hear before anyone else.

This installment is “Black Ice,” the apocalyptic final track on psychedelic sludge-rock group Naam’s self-titled debut (Tee Pee), out now. The recorded the album on a farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Bassist-vocalist John Bundy fills us in on the song below.

REVOLVER What’s this song about?
JOHN BUNDY This song is the closer to the record, both literally and figuratively. Since the album is a loosely based concept on the fall of man, “Black Ice” is the final chapter on the road to damnation. You’ve walked through the gates of Hell, and you definitely know where you are, and man it’s a terrifying place.

Which part of it did you come up with first?
This song came at a point when we were writing our second wave of songs as a band. At that point we had actually decided on a concept for the record, so this was more or less our hellsong. Ryan [Lugar, guitars and vocals] had this winding riff that I was able to actually wind in and out of as well, so the beginning half of the song is a deep ’70s metal groove that sets up the latter half, which gives way to more nightmarish feel. The blast beats and buzzsaw guitar and bass at the end were a good way to convey the “Hey man, you’re in Hell” concept we had going. The blast beats and tremolo picking were actually kind of a joke at first, but it starting sounding good, and we got better as a band, so we kept it.

Was this an easy song to write?
As we progressed as a band, the song obviously became easier to play. None of us had really experimented with this style at all, although Eli [Pizzuto, percussion] was more accustomed to playing faster and more aggressive music. Writing it was easy. It just made sense in the grand scheme of creating the record. And believe it or not, recording it was the easiest part. Recording at the farm made everything easy. We just nailed it, and Evan's production made it more punishing than it already was.

What sort of feedback have you gotten on this song so far?
Everybody seems to love this one. It’s got a swirling psych feel leading into straight up black metal with very little transition, so there’s something to grab onto all the way around. The vocals are hypnotizing as well, but live everyone just focuses on Eli. He’s a fuckin’ madman on this one and slays it every time.

You have a long list of gear you used to record your full-length with on your
MySpace page. What was the most unusual instrument you used when creating
the album?
Unfortunately some of the more unusual instruments got cut. There were some synth, noise, and Theremin ideas that didn’t make it, and some weird-ass recordings from the basement involving rocks and machetes—even tons of field recordings from the farm. It wasn’t so much the instrumentation that was weird, it was the means.

We had time to record pretty much everything we could possibly imagine, and trimmed away from there. Since we're just a three-piece live, recording was an opportunity to play everything on the record. I’d say about a third of the record was improv. Track 2 is a live drum circle, and if you listen during the other interludes, you can hear us talking and moving around. We did try to use everything we brought up to the farm. Overkill is fun.

Naam: "Black Ice"

Photo credit: Diane Suarez