Now that the Death Camp project has been wrapped up in a tidy bow of purply-pink entrails, Lil' Copenhagen and the Andychrist are free to construct a new legend, a new legacy of brutality. A period of respectful mourning must first pass, in which we face a present and future bereft of blood-stinking warehouse gigs commenced by Copes's black sermons; the growled "Bow your motherfucking heads" shall silence the unruly mass no more. How now will this once-in-a-generation gift for putrid belched-forth beauty be skinned and eviscerated and reanimated into something new?
"I might want to, like, sing," Copes said recently, bonfire-lit and profoundly stoned. ("Singing" vs. being the vocalist, singing not being a feature of x-treem metal.) The Andychrist slowly leveled a gut-ashing glower at him. Chastened, Copes said weakly "My vocal cords don't seem to coarsen . . . everything's still pink and tender and ouchy for a week after and . . . " But this threat has not been repeated. Fortunately for East Bay evil, he's still too young to have that itch so many hollerers and shriekers seem to get in their late 20s, wherein their desire to croon, or at least perform intelligible lyrics, increases greatly. (Warning signs include a gradual shift in drunken karaoke choices from Maiden and Priest to Journey and Boston slow jamz, and an emphasis on early, melancholy Modest Mouse numbers for shower singing.)
But naturally, like all musicians who take their music half-seriously, the band's name is being debated before the genre is determined. An option I'm rooting for is combining a total lack of the band's name on recorded material and reporting it verbally as both "Phantom" and "Bantam", rather slurredly, so that no one's really sure which it is. (That's another sign of the half-serious musician: having How do fuck with our stupid fans? as an integral part of persona-sculpting.)
